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As China’s growth engines sputter, Europe remains weak and India focuses inward, African economies correspondingly retrench severely . Where African nations once were growing at a steady five percent a year, thanks to Chinese demand, now much of sub-Saharan Africa is increasing its GDP per capita at only two and three percent a year, with South … Continue reading
Brazil has much more to offer to a modernizing sub-Saharan Africa than it is now providing. Given its proximity to Africa, its size (a third of the African continent south of the Sahara desert), its wealth, its long association with Africa from the slave-trading era, its political and economic successes after decades of authoritarian military … Continue reading
Terrorists are in it as much for the loot as for the ideology. The Islamic State, or ISIS, could hardly exist, whatever its Islamist fervor, without hard cash from sales of pilfered petroleum, taxes on its subject population and kidnappings for ransom. Likewise ISIS- and al-Qaida-linked groups in Africa prosper by trafficking drugs across the … Continue reading
Drug smuggling and its profits help significantly to fuel Africa’s wars as criminal enterprises. Terrorists frequently build drug-driven hybrid organizations to finance their operations and to reap illicit rents. In Mali, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia, conflict is strongly tied to drug trafficking by syndicates allied to al-Qaeda–associated insurgents. The … Continue reading
Africa and Asia: The Key Issues 