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Murray Hunter | 5 Jun 2020 | Mail & Guardian Few pro-democracy activists in Southern Africa need to be told that their governments don’t respect the right to privacy. Although the spying powers of governments in the region are dwarfed by those in the United States or China, there is growing concern that African governments may be listening in on conversations and … [Read more...] about The quiet rise of spy states

Mohamed Adow, May/June 2020 Issue | Foreign Affairs Growing up in a pastoral community in northern Kenya gave me a certain clarity about the climate crisis, a clarity born not from abstract understandings but from visceral experience. In 2000, a drought killed much of my father’s cattle herd and destroyed our neighbors’ livelihoods. I helped distribute parcels of food to … [Read more...] about The Climate Debt: What the West Owes the Rest

May 20, 2020 |May 20, 2020|Heritage Foundation The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) two-decade-long blitz of engagement in Africa has likely given it extensive surveillance access to the continent. Chinese companies, all of which are legally obliged to help the CCP gather intelligence, have built at least 186 government buildings in Africa and at least 14 sensitive … [Read more...] about Government Buildings in Africa Are a Likely Vector for Chinese Spying

And a lot is riding on whether Washington can figure out which strategy Beijing has chosen. Hal Brands and Jake Sullivan |May 22, 2020 | Foreign Policy Xi Jinping’s China is displaying a superpower’s ambition. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would … [Read more...] about China Has Two Paths to Global Domination

Maurice Stierl | May 13, 2020 | The Conversation “You have to understand,” Warsan Shire writes in her poem Home, “that no one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land.” But what do you do when not only the land of departure but also the land of arrival becomes unsafe? In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, some European countries have … [Read more...] about Migration: how Europe is using coronavirus to reinforce its hostile environment in the Mediterranean