In The News

The Russian-Turkish Rapprochement Could Benefit Armenia

Haroutiun Khachatrian February 3, 2005
As Turkey edges closer to integration into the European Union, long-standing problems on its opposite frontier are holding the country back. In addition to Turkey's troubled history of violence against its Kurdish minority, Turkish relations with neighboring Armenia have been strained for decades. Turkey has refused to recognize the killing of many Armenians in 1915 as "genocide,"...

Can the World Deliver for Africa?

Larry Elliott February 2, 2005
2005 may be the year of Africa, if UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other officials have anything to do with it. Britain, charged this year with the coinciding presidencies of both the EU and the G8, has vowed to make African economic revival a priority. The poorest continent in the world is steadily growing poorer, as standards of living, health, education, and economic productivity are far...

Fakes!

Frederik Balfour February 2, 2005
Counterfeiting is a criminal activity that costs the global economy billions every year. The manufacturers of fake goods have become increasingly professional, their wares often indistinguishable from the real things. And by slipping counterfeit products – or parts of products – into the supply chain at different stages, they have slipped seamlessly into the world market. China is central to...

How Globalization Train is Overrunning Nigeria

Etim Imisim January 27, 2005
A member of the World Trade Organization for the past ten years, Nigeria should be well-situated to reap the benefits of free trade. Yet thanks to a set of domestic and international factors, the country may even be sliding backwards. In an interview with Nigerian newspaper This Day, development expert Bankole Olubamise argues gloomily that much has gone afoul in Africa's most populous...

Quality Drugs, by the Kilo

Paul McGeough January 13, 2005
Three years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the country's narcotics industry is booming. Last year, 87 percent of the world's opium originated from the Afghan trade, and the United Nations has recently warned that the country - trading about US $2.8 billion in drugs - is becoming a "narco-state." And thus, despite the West's tough talk about eliminating the...

China's African Safari

Paul Mooney January 3, 2005
Since the 1960s, China has been rather consistent in offering assistance to African countries in agriculture, heavy industries, and infrastructure development. In recent years, Sino-African trade has enjoyed particularly rapid growth. As Paul Mooney reports, many African leaders, regarding China as a reliable friend who has suffered the similar imperialist aggression by Western powers, welcome...

A Thaw in South Asia? – Part II

Huma Fakhar December 27, 2004
Improved relations between South Asia's two most prominent states, India and Pakistan, are crucial to the region's ascending global profile, write Huma Fakhar and Jean-Pierre Lehmann. Encouraging diplomatic developments have diluted some of the hostile sentiments of shared by the two countries, which were once on a path to nuclear war. If intra-regional trade would heat up, as well,...