The West is gearing up for another military intervention in Libya after destroying the country in 2011. What is the African Union - and all Africans - doing about this? What is the role of the AU Special Envoy to Libya, former Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete? At the minimum, the UN should be told that there should be no Western intervention until there is a full-scale inquiry into the first intervention.

The current racist agitations against refugees and their homes cannot be separated from the laws which for decades have put migrants into camps and collective housing. The historical perspective on German immigration politics shows how discourses of distinctive national identities and legislative change mutually reinforce one another.

The European project of closing down the borders ensures that ever more people migrate to the North due to a lack of alternatives. The theatre director Riadh Ben Ammar is committed to the idea of freedom of movement and has created a theatre play to promote the topic. In this interview, he argues that people would not permanently stay in Europe if everyone would be able to move legally between Southern and Northern countries.

Many people from African countries, especially the youth, leave their homes in hope for a better life. The Global North contributes to these migration movements in various direct and indirect ways, from destroying the livelihoods of farmers and fisher (wo)men to the changing climate. Under these conditions migration is often the only way for young people to survive.

KPTJ says the cases collapsed as a result of contamination of evidence through systematic victim/witness interference and an orchestrated political and diplomatic campaign by the Kenyan government at the behest of suspects of international crimes to intimidate and discredit the Court.

Freedom of expression is under threat in Kenya. In the past, bloggers have been arrested and detained on baseless charges. The latest turn of events is the Central Bank of Kenya’s allegation that bloggers are responsible for the collapse of one the country’s banks.

Nigerian journalist and author, Chido Onumah, a frequent contributor to Pambazuka News, just turned 50. To celebrate the milestone, he reflects on his life, work and the contradictions of the Nigerian nation.

Few Canadians are familiar with pre-colonial African cities, and even fewer know a Canadian military leader helped sack one of West Africa’s great metropolises. When the British and Canadians took part in the ‘Scramble for Africa’, they did so with impunity, a complete disregard for property, sacred forests and people. They only saw savages that needed to be tamed.

Civil society organisations from the Democratic Republic Congo have expressed their opposition to a planned visit by French MPs to genocide commemorations in Rwanda this month. The organisations accuse the MPs of turning a blind eye to the horrendous atrocities committed by Paul Kagame’s regime in Rwanda, DR Congo and the Great Lakes region over the last 20 years. Experts on the region describe Kagame as “the greatest war criminal in office today.”

President Robert Mugabe is not solely to blame for the economic problems facing Zimbabwe as many in the western world have claimed. 

Abstracts are invited for contributions to a forthcoming edited volume that aims to bring forward the different ways in which activists, theorists and writers in and beyond Africa have engaged with Sankara’s political philosophies and praxis since his assassination in 1987.

Three members of the Bohra community in Australia were recently convicted for performing FGM on two little sisters, bringing to global attention continued existence of the condemned practice among this global community whose origins is India. Five Bohra women are working hard to end this practice, as they discuss in this interview.

On the 31st March 2016 the Constitutional Court ruled that both the President and parliament had breached democratic principles by covering up and allowing public funds to be used for the private benefit of the President. Thus we support the call by the SA National Defence Force Union (Sandu) of 1st April 2016, for mass action to remove the President and the entire parliament from office.

If the South African political economy continues to be ‘privatised’ by large business, it will weaken the state through corruption and cronyism and undermine good governance and the rule of law. It will systematically deter new private investment, both foreign and domestic, and create obstacles to small and medium-sized enterprises, the backbone of any competitive economy.

It is troubling that an electoral body that is unanimously declared grossly incompetent for noncompliance of electoral laws by the highest court in the land can still be deemed by the same court to have conducted valid presidential and parliamentary elections. The findings and the conclusions are a contradiction in terms.

In almost every nation, punitive drug policies have the greatest impact on women who are already coping with poverty and social neglect, histories of physical and sexual violence, and marginalization. The UN special assembly on drugs to be held this month provides an important opportunity for women’s rights to be included in the global policies on illicit drugs.

On Sunday, 3 April 2016, the West Indies beat their old adversary, England, in the Final of the World T-20 Championship in Kolkata, India, to become the only country to clinch the title twice. If you only see cricket as a game – especially when it is played by blacks against nations that have practiced racial discrimination against blacks in the past – you will entirely miss the passion that drives it.

South Africa’s once revered ANC ruling party now behaves as if it is entitled to the republic. The motto on the country’s parliamentary coat of arms may as well be changed from ‘We, the People’ to ‘We, the ANC.’ Firebrand opposition leader Julius Malema may have a point when he says the liberation party is turning the country into just another banana republic.

This is a provocative book that provides students of international politics, foreign policy analysts, diplomacy, media practitioners and the sensitive general reader a critical entry point into the media in foreign policy formulation and implementation in a post-colonial state like Nigeria.

It behooves the Committee to produce an official report detailing the “consultations” they claim to have done for all to know why Parliament still refuses to heed the demands of Ghanaian civil society groups and faith-based organisations which who have formally petitioned them. The minimum courtesy one expects is a report detailing why their objections were not taken into consideration.

Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter. The reason they do this is because they legally can.

In recent years, over two dozen articles have appeared in African American and African media detailing deep-rooted institutional racism against Black workers at the World Bank. Conspicuously, the Western media has kept the issue out of its radar screen. But branding Africa as "a hopeless continent" comes naturally to the Western media pontiffs.

This article by Kenyan economist and public affairs analyst Dr. David Ndii drew sharp reactions from pro-regime supporters, with some of the more virulent ones calling for his arrest – in a country that is increasingly anti-intellectual and repressive. Dr. Ndii’s contention is that Kenya is a failed project. The country, he proposes controversially, should break up into independent, viable nations.

Professor Mafeje contributed enormously to the concrete understanding of the African socio-political and economic situation. He emphasised the structural need to substantiate theoretical positions on issues in practice as a means to solve Africa’s problems. The annual lecture in his honour immortalizes his perspectives.

Unless South Africans stand up to reclaim the right to determine their own destiny, they are in danger of watching our beloved country becoming a predatory state. The hyenas are gathering.

The destiny of Ethiopia is in the hands and feet of all Ethiopians. They have the power to pick her up or to drop her and shatter her like glass. They can walk with her on the long road to freedom or they can leave her in the wheelchair built for her by the current dictatorship.

As a wealthy white westerner with power and aess to resources, Brennan philanthropic mission to help Malawian prisoner-musicians feels too close to the archetype of the great white savior who is also selling the story of ‘poor Africa’.

The real crisis is not the influx of refugees to Europe per se but a toxic combination of destabilising foreign policy agendas, economic austerity and the rise of right-wing nationalism, which is likely to push the world further into social and political chaos in the months ahead.

The recent controversy surrounding the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College provides an excellent backdrop to understanding Oxford’s structural and institutionalised backwardness in the area of social science teaching and research.

Where rights are at stake, immediate action is required. Those who continue to uphold the existing, highly skewed international economic and financial order delay the realization of human rights by many decades, thereby becoming responsible for hundreds of millions of poverty-related deaths in the meantime.

Despite the allure of the solar mega-project, the environmental/climate justice movement must question the Moroo’s propaganda and the emergent dominant global discourse around environmental governance to which it is linked. The urgent questions about this project include: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? And whose good is being served?

Beyond being inconvenient for knowing too much, Gustavo Castro Soto falls into the repressive government’s category of public enemy. Like Cáceres, Castro has been a vocal opponent of dam construction on indigenous rivers, as well as of the broad powers given transnational corporations and the local elite to plunder democracy and the riches of nature.

For years, the program has been associated with human rights abuses and the forced relocation of indigenous communities while paving the road for large-scale land grabs. These issues were highlighted in a report by the World Bank’s own independent Inspection Panel in 2015. Rather than addressing the grave concerns raised about the program, the Bank, instead, chose to launch an almost identical initiative under a new name.