Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the night when Mohamed Siyad Barre, president of the last entity that could plausibly be described as the government of Somalia, fled Mogadishu in hi...
In my review last week of Africa's likely top flash points for 2011, I expressed my concern that The year that was supposed to be Côte d'Ivoire's "ann...
If all goes as planned, exactly one month from today, on January 9, 2011, voters in the ten states of southern Sudan as well as southerners living in the northern part of the country and abroad w...
His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Chief Custodian of the Sacre...
Just when it seems things can get no worse for Somalia's dubiously legitimate, utterly ineffective, and wholly self-serving "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), the embattled clique pull...
Last Friday, speaking in New York to reporters one day after attending a major meeting on Somalia chaired by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the margins of the 65th session the Un...
In my annual survey of African "hot spots" back in January, I noted that "al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) seems to be stirring again as well as getting more involved in illicit trafficking...
Focused on the final stretch of the midterm elections at home, policymakers and pundits in the United States have hardly evinced any interest in concerning themselves with electoral politics abro...
In the end, neither the superabundant expressions of support voiced by donor nations for the ramshackle “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) of Somalia nor that regime’s corr...
Last week, Somalis marked the fiftieth anniversary of their achievement of independence from colonial rule. The contrasting manner in which two parts of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic obs...
Last week, the United Nations Security Council rescheduled for mid-May a planned fact-finding mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Officially, the trip was cancelled because of the...
After a nineteen year UN presence in the Western Sahara, the Security Council is about to follow Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's recommendation and vote to extend the mandate of the United N...
Former President George W. Bush is nowadays widely derided for his "faith-based" approach to foreign policy, characterized, according to its critics, by both the overweening ambitions of its prom...
With opposition parties likely to boycott critical parts of the Sudanese elections scheduled to begin on Sunday, not only are the polls unlikely to deliver anything close to the “democratic...
Over the last decade the United States has successfully transformed its foreign aid efforts. Dollars aren't simply being delivered to corrupt regimes, helping keep them in power with nothing...
As the Iranian regime celebrated its 31st birthday last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first ordered and then boasted that the nuclear plant at Natanz had successfully enriched uranium to 19...
Over the course of the last month, the foiled attempt by would-be "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day has underscored the dan...
By: Dr. J. Peter Pham In recent days, the United Nations celebrated International Civil Aviation Day, commemorating the 65th anniversary of the signing of the Convention on International...
Guinea cannot seem to catch a break. In 1958, it was the only French colony to opt for an immediate break with France rather than continued association with Paris leading to gradual inde...
By Dr. Peter Pham After maintaining a relatively low profile since the end of the monsoon season two months ago, Somali pirates literally shot their way back into the headlines...