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This thing called Kroll

When Kroll, working for the displaced government of Kuwait, revealed, in 1991, that Saddam Hussein was a major shareholder in Hachette, France’s largest publisher, it confirmed an existing view in...

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Word of the day: Nonindifference

The challenge of humanitarian intervention in conflicts, as former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan originally framed it, saw a bitter divide split Western from developing countries. When the...

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Development as firefighting

We should also bear in mind that very little aid has so far been given to people in the poorest countries. It is sometimes observed that roughly $500 billion has been given to sub-Saharan Africa since...

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Copenhagen post-mortem

just think: for several decades, we have had tons of international summits almost all of them have failed to produce anything of value Why do we keep setting our expectations so high? That is Bill...

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Dani Rodrik: Give China a break

Congress and Wall Street and Main Street are for once in agreement: enough of this market manipulation, China needs to let its currency appreciate and balance its trade; US manufacturing is bleeding on...

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Do sanctions kill babies?

Yes, says Ioana Petrescu, albeit temporarily and (I would add) maybe not in the big picture. Economic sanctions are the West’s knee-jerk response to nasty actions by nasty regimes. Make nastiness more...

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Bill Clinton picks his world leaders to watch

Foreign Policy interviews Bill Clinton. The question I liked the most: “Top three leaders that people should pay attention to, other than Obama.” Clinton responds: The prime minister of Australia,...

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The other Clinton, on development strategies

Over at Foreign Policy, Bill Easterly comments on Hillary’s big development speech yesterday. His basic conclusion: mostly meandering babble, but it’s not her fault. One bit I liked: his comparison of...

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The number one sign you might be about to lose a war

[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn’t get [Tommy] Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and...

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“The UN of today is not the UN I entered”

Yesterday I moderated a session with James O.C. Jonah, the former Number Two at the UN (under Boutros Boutros-Ghali). The title is his quote. After dedicating a lifetime to the institution, he is...

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Some advice for military humanitarians

The last thing you need to have on CNN is American troops clubbing desperate villagers like baby seals at a relief distribution site. That is Gary Anderson writing in the Small Wars Journal. Hat tip to...

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Because TPS just ain’t enough

U.S. policy wipes out more than 80 percent of a Haitian’s earning power when it keeps him from coming to the United States. This affects everything from the food he can buy to the construction...

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China in Africa: A China-bashing backlash

In 2008, China replaced the US as Africa’s largest trading partner, with the volume of trade reaching $107bn, representing a tenfold increase since 2000. With foreign direct investment rising from...

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The Africa of the night

Sarkozy did nothing of the kind. Many had believed him when, as a presidential candidate, he committed himself to a postcolonial clean-up in a speech in Benin in 2006: ‘We must rid Franco-African...

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A rather obvious but increasingly necessary Sunday morality lesson for the...

“If we do the right thing, it will be good not only for the people whose lives we save but for the U.S. image in Pakistan,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for...

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Is Somalia better off without a government?

Peter Leeson has a provocative new 2007 paper I have just seen: A comprehensive view of the data that allow pre- and post-anarchy welfare comparisons suggest that anarchy has improved overall...

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Does foreign aid improve or reduce human rights and governance?

We help arbitrate the debate over this question by leveraging a novel source of exogeneity: the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. We find that when a country’s former colonizer...

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“Is the @NewYorker publishing puff profiles of mercenaries Executive Outcomes...

That is the tweet of the week, from @AfricasACountry. They’re talking about this article, “How a Texas philanthropist funded the hunt for Joseph Kony”: Davis told me when we spoke again in New York...

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The dangers of Google idealism

Julian Assange tells a fascinating tale about Schmidt and Google in Newsweek: Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault...

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In case you thought most foreign aid went to poor people, let me depress you...

A beautiful graphic by Raul Amoros. Hat tip @d_wlkr. If you’re burning to explain this madness, and want to go beyond “U.S. interests in oil, invasions, drugs and Israel”, then here are the four...

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