Africa

The countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) and those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are crucial to the development of the world economy. Highly skilled migration to and from these regions is key to the recent socio-political transformations that have occurred across the world.

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform investigates the wide variance of occurrence and outcomes of Arab uprisings and the deep historical and structural roots of power imbalances within societies to ask why regime change took place in only four Arab countries and why democratic change proved so elusive in the countries that made attempts.

A Political Economy of the Middle East is the most comprehensive analysis of developments in the political economy of the region over the past several decades, examining the interaction of economic development processes, state systems and policies, and social actors in the Middle East.

This book is a collection of the author's blogposts from 2008–2013, almost all of them from the Huffington Post and reposted on the website of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs by the International Security Program. Most of them deal with the author's particular area of expertise, from Morocco to Bangladesh, but also with Europe and transatlantic issues. A few are film reviews, and others deal with the U.S. Presidency and the Congress.

"Nowhere is the missed opportunity to build human capacity more evident than in the case of women and agriculture in Africa. The majority of farmers in Africa are women. Women provide 70%–80% of the labor for food crops grown in Africa, an effort without which African citizens would not eat. Female farmers make up 48% of the African labor force. This work by women is a crucial effort in nations where the economy is usually based on agriculture."

"This book argues that sustaining African economic prosperity will require significant efforts to modernize the continent's economy through the application of science and technology in agriculture. In other words, agriculture needs to be viewed as a knowledge-based entrepreneurial activity. The argument is based on the premise that smart investments in agriculture will have multiplier effects in many sectors of the economy and help spread prosperity. More specifically, the book focuses on the importance of boosting support for agricultural research as part of a larger agenda to promote innovation, invest in enabling infrastructure, build human capacity, stimulate entrepreneurship and improve the governance of innovation."

This 2009 Index of African Governance measures the degree to which...five categories of political goods [are] provided within Africa's fifty-three (forty-eight in prior Indexes) countries. By comprehensively measuring the performance of government in this manner, that is, by measuring governance, the Index is able to offer a report card on the accomplishments of each government for the years being investigated-2000 and 2002 (for baseline indications) and 2005, 2006, and 2007 (the last years with reasonably complete available data for nearly all African nation-states). For those analysts who would like separately to explore the performance of countries on various aspects of governance, the Index includes scores in each of the five categories.