Developments in Kenya show what happens when “counter-terrorist” police and other security forces are not subject to public accountability.
Many Egyptians are smarting from the betrayal of their revolution while the military-backed regime tightens its grip. The international community can no longer ignore this.
Netanyahu is warning us off an organisation which, like Israeli Zionism, claims its legitimacy on religious grounds and certain narratives of religious history.
A catalogue of sexual violence has accompanied the armed conflict in Colombia. The peace talks must not brush it under the carpet.
Militarisation of the police is a developing phenomenon, spreading into nominally democratic societies as the bonds of popular consent to the status quo weaken.
Scaling back police militarization will not end the abuse of the state; the US has consistently mobilized the same tactics and attitudes towards undesirable communities domestically and abroad.
Since 1993, there have been calls for the legal and political recognition of starvation as a weapon of war. In Syria, it has regained distressing urgency.
Navi Pillay offered a scathing indictment of the UN Security Council's failures to address global crises, most notably in Syria. But the paralysed state of the UN may finally offer the chance to address its inherently undemocratic structure.
Now that the main potential impediment to a peace deal–a change in government–is out of the picture, it is time to start tackling other threats, not just to securing the agreement, but also to its implementation.
The world now knows the name of James Foley, the US journalist brutally murdered by Islamic State. Rather fewer have heard of Kajieme Powell, also a US citizen—also now dead.
So far, Washington has successfully escaped blame for the rise of ISIS. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.
The fighting factional leaders in South Sudan have not just been engaging each other’s forces: they have dragooned the civilian population into a wider campaign of devastation.
