The New Scramble for Africa’s Wealth

Africa is a vast continent with many valuable resources, particularly arable land. Unfortunately, this fact is not a secret. Many nations outside of Africa recognize the potential that currently underutilized (or perceived as underutilized) land holds, and several...

TAKE ACTION: Pirates or Disempowered Somalis?

ACTION ALERT! If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably heard a lot about pirates. Not the swashbuckling, patch-over-the-eye, ruthless robber kind, but the disempowered, poverty-stricken, Somali kind. Although the piracy situation off the coast of...

Evaluating the Somali “Pirate” Situation

by Beth Tuckey For many of us, the word “pirate” conjures up a whole host of images, most notably that of a swashbuckling, patch-over-the-eye, ruthless robber. In our history texts, pirates sailed the high seas in search of treasure chests of gold, often in...

A Change of the Guards in Somalia

By Beth Tuckey As Ethiopia continues its troop withdrawal in Somalia, the international community is holding its breath in hopes that the transition is peaceful. After two years of U.S.-backed occupation of Somalia, Ethiopia finally recognized that its presence could...

A Different Olympic Story

When President Bush said he was attending the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games despite China’s misdeeds in the international arena, he said it is because the Olympics are about sports, not politics. Did anyone buy that? We like to think that the...

Somalia Mourns a ‘Golden Era’ as Crisis Worsens

Last year, the people of Somalia caught a glimpse of tranquility. It was fleeting and certainly not without its violent interruptions, but the few months of rule under the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) is now being called Somalia’s ‘golden era’ by top United Nations...