political marketplace

A revised version of my 2009 Christian Michelsen lecture is published by the London Review of Books. In the lecture, I argue that conventional models of state-building that are based on trying to achieve an end-state that accords with an

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There is one very important issue which has not been raised by anyone, as I have listened to all reports from the election observers , until now , that is the buying and selling of votes and loyalty. According to

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Alex de Waal’s Christian Michelsen lecture, ‘Fixing the Political Marketplace,’ given last month in Bergen, Norway, is now available online at this link. His article ‘The Price of Peace’ in Prospect magazine can be accessed here.

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Conventional peacekeeping operations are designed as stop-gap measures, either for a brief period of time or with a limited brief in a frozen conflict. This can be functional if the peacekeepers are dealing with institutionalized belligerents, with functioning hierarchies. In

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The political geometry of Sudan defies resolution. No sooner had a framework been agreed for the provisional settlement of the North-South conflict in 2002 than the war in Darfur blew away all conventional wisdom about how the country could achieve

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It’s frequently observed that Darfur’s conflict has “spilled over” into Chad and Central African Republic. It is probably more accurate to say that Darfur has become part of a regional nexus of conflict that includes these two countries, characterized by

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