This workshop will provide an opportunity for postgraduate students in the broad field of law and development to reflect on its themes, progress and future.

Marice Fahé

Ley-Ngardigal Djimadoum

Government officials on a tour of the US failed in their attempts to build diaspora support for Ethiopia’s five-year economic programme, thanks to ‘Zenawi’s tenacious, resolute and dogged opponents’, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. ‘The diaspora may be divided but not when it comes to Zenawi’s regime.’

I’m no supporter of Osama bin Laden but the assertion that his killing ‘marks the triumph against global terrorism’ is ‘laughable and absurd’, writes Mphutlane wa Bofelo. Why won’t the West recognise that it is its own disregard for the lives and worldviews of people in the Global South that fuels rage and resistance against it?

'We have no freedom to celebrate today. We live in a radically unjust society…Until everyone’s voice counts equally we cannot say that we are free’, the Unemployed People’s Movement writes from Grahamstown, in a statement to mark South Africa’s ‘Freedom Day’ on 27 April.

‘Few things are more hateful’ than the ‘deliberate manipulation of the minds of the broken and destitute in the name of liberation,’ writes Pedro Alexis Tabensky, as the ANC attempts to win support from South Africa’s poorest communities by portraying the party as ‘the representatives of God on earth’.

How healthy is Malawi's leader for democracy in that country? Akwete Sande analyses the political situation in Malawi.

In this presentation to the Rotary International District Conference in Munyonyo, Mahmood Mamdani links events in Tahrir Square to the 1976 Soweto uprisings in South Africa. This is a the full text of the speech.

The narrative of the Egyptian revolution is being distorted by old, Western ways of seeing the Arab world. Rabab El-Mahdi suggests a different narrative.

Mazin Qumsiyeh discusses the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in the light of the continued oppression of the Palestinian people.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has said Robert Mugabe is among the seven worst ‘press freedom predators’ on the African continent. In a statement released to mark World Press Freedom Day the group also named leaders Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), Issaias Afeworki (Eritrea), Teodoro Obiang Nguema (Equatorial Guinea), Paul Kagamé (Rwanda), King Mswati III (Swaziland) and Somalia’s Islamist militias, Al-Shabaab and Hizb-Al-Islam. Despite the formation of a coalition government in Zimbabwe, Reporters Without Borders, said because of Mugabe, 'Zimbabwe’s privately-owned print media are constantly harassed and that the state-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) has a monopoly of radio and TV broadcasting'.

Some 21 villagers from Nyambeya in Cashel Valley have been forced to flee their village after ZANU PF militia carried out an early morning raid on Sunday (01 May) and burned down seven houses owned by MDC-T officials. Homes belonging to MDC ward chairman Moses Chemwanyisa, ward youth chairman Admire Chizikani and his mother Naomi were torched.

Following on from

Commenting on the Western media’s preference towards coverage of particular uprisings across North Africa, Tendai Marima asks ‘what makes Burkina Faso's crisis so un-newsworthy that it is easily swept under the news pile?'

A new article from the Bank Information Centre's Paulina Garzon looks at the current status of the World Bank's energy strategy review, which has run into controversy at the Board of Directors. The article notes the politics surrounding the policy. 'The WB has spent almost two years developing the new Energy Sector Strategy (EsE),[1] expected to be approved in July 2011. The EsE will be the guiding instrument in modernizing the energy sector with two main objectives: 1) to increase access to modern and reliable energy, especially for the poor, and 2) to facilitate the transition into an energy sector that is environmentally sustainable and with low carbon emissions.'

Reflecting on the context behind South Sudan's exercise in self-determination and the potential sources of political violence following the country’s independence, Mahmood Mamdani explores Sudan's longer-term historical experience – the role of imposed administrative identities under the colonial system, migration, religion, slavery and the emergence of a politicised Islam – and the contemporary challenges around rethinking political citizenship.

Every minute, somewhere in the world, a child goes blind according to the World Health Organisation. Three in five poor children who go blind are likely to die within two years of losing their sight - yet half of cases of childhood blindness are avoidable. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of blindness in the world - 1.24 per 1,000 children, compared to 0.8 in India and 0.3 in Europe.

Sierra Leone re-introduced local government councils in 2004 after a 30-year absence; the experience of the last six years is prompting questions about how to successfully introduce effective democratic authority and responsiveness at the local level in a country where few have experience of active participation in governance. Devolution of responsibility to local councils is behind schedule, with responsibility for key services such as water and waste management and infrastructure like roads among the important areas remaining under the central government's control.

Switzerland says it has frozen nearly $1bn worth of assets linked to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and the deposed leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey said some 830m Swiss francs (£580m; $960m) had been discovered. Of that, the largest proportion - 410m SFr - was linked to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his circle, the minister said.

In scenes redolent of the kidnapping of Patrice Lumumba and storming of Salvador Allende’s presidential palace, France’s recent activities in Côte d’Ivoire have been purely about establishing self-interested ‘regime change’, argues Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe.