While the world looks elsewhere, Somalia is in flames. The nation just topped a list of the world’s most unstable countries by Foreign Policy magazine, and the United Nations has declared the humanitarian situation there “worse than Darfur.”

In the next three months the number of people requiring immediate food aid will reach 3.5 million. Over one million refugees have fled their homes. Due to a raging insurgency against the current transitional government – which has support from both the West and Ethiopia – Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has earned the nickname, “Baghdad on the sea.”

In Somalia, there are no diplomatic superstars like Condoleezza Rice or Kofi Annan, who rushed to Kenya to settle its election crisis; there are no celebrities like Mia Farrow or Jim Carrey to urge international action and awareness as they did in Sudan and Burma.

This Report analyzes politically motivated and food-related human rights violations in the run up to the 27 June run-off of 2008. Since the release of the ZPP Post Election Violence Report No. 2 of May 2008 which had, among other things, postulated an escalation in election violence, questions have arisen about the extent to which these postulations have remained consistent with unfolding scenarios in the run up to the June election. Also of interest is how this presidential run-off [the first of its kind in Zimbabwe’s post independence electoral history] will influence trends and patterns of violence.

This new investigative report exposes another hidden aspect of export-driven resource extraction in the DRC and the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. Internal company documents obtained by Greenpeace International show how the German owned, Swiss-based logging multinational Danzer Group, one of the largest players in the Congo logging sector, is using an elaborate profit-laundering system designed to move income out of Africa and into offshore bank accounts, thereby appearing to evade tax payments in the countries in which its companies operate.

South Africa's highest court on Thursday ruled against African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma in his attempt to stop seized evidence being used against him in a corruption trial. Nine of the 10 judges of the Constitutional Court said warrants used in raids on Zuma and his lawyer were valid and the state could use seized documents in its prosecution of Zuma, the frontrunner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki next year.

Experts fear presidential elections scheduled for November may be destabilised following the withdrawal of the opposition African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) from the national unity government on 25 July.

Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on Wednesday he hoped talks aimed at resolving the country's political crisis would give President Robert Mugabe an "honourable exit". Mugabe's Zanu PF party began power-sharing talks with the opposition in South Africa last week, but doubts have surfaced over progress after they were adjourned on Tuesday.

A ruling by the Abuja Federal High Court has ordered the Nigerian government to halt the transfer of the disputed oil-rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon pending the determination of a case against the move. The ruling will strike a blow to an agreement on the transfer of the peninsula to Cameroon on 14 August this year. Until the International Court of Justice ruled in favour of Cameroon, the two sides had had several clashes over the area's ownership.

Rapid urbanisation is a fact of live even in the least developed countries where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. This paper examines the causes, consequences and policy implications of the ongoing urbanisation in the African less developed countries (LDCs). The authors find that the employment opportunities in either rural or the urban sector are not growing adequately.

Peace agreements form a crucial element of strategies to bring security from outside: they involve third-party mediators during the negotiation stage and often peacekeeping troops to guarantee the agreement at an implementation stage. This paper reviews parts of the academic debate on power sharing and war termination, touching on some key findings by the main researchers working on the topic.

Swaziland will hold a parliamentary election on Sept. 19 under the Tinkhundla system of government, the chairperson of the Elections and Boundaries Commission announced on Wednesday, the South African Press Association reported.

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua said on Thursday the biggest problem in Africa's most populous nation was poor leadership and rounded on public servants who abused their positions of power to gain personal wealth. Even among follow Africans, Nigeria is seen as the home of the "big man" mentality, where "Ogas" -- bosses in pidgin -- bark commands at all and sundry and travel in convoys with blaring sirens through the chaotic traffic.

SADC appointed mediator and South African President Thabo Mbeki, arrived in Zimbabwe late on Wednesday to meet his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe and the leader of the smaller faction of the MDC, Arthur Mutambara as the negotiating talks are adjourned after leadership role differences.

United Nations relief officials have warned that heavy rains across West Africa have brought renewed flooding to the region, threatening the homes and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people and jeopardizing the already fragile food security situation.

Large increases in biofuels production in the United States and Europe are the main reason behind the steep rise in global food prices, a top World Bank economist said in research just published. World Bank economist Don Mitchell concluded that biofuels and related low grain inventories, speculative activity, and food export bans pushed prices up by 70 percent to 75 percent.

A British water company thrown out of Tanzania over a bungled privatisation deal has failed in its bid to win up to £10m in damages. Biwater, whose local management team was deported from Dar es Salaam in 2005, took Tanzania's government to the World Bank's business tribunal in 2006, arguing that its assets had been expropriated and its contract illegally terminated.

People in government, business, and political and civil society organisations routinely talk about 'stakeholders'. They do exercises in stakeholder analysis to inform their 'strategic planning'. Invariably they use the stakeholder language to advertise claims about the inclusivity of their thinking, their processes, and their practice. The organisation we work with [Church Land Programme (CLP)] was asked recently to prepare an input for a 'stakeholder analysis' for a collegial NGO and this forced us to reflect on why we were so uncomfortable with the very idea. We presented some of our thinking as the basis for discussions at the NGO meeting. It was good that there was a mix of people there including grassroots militants as well as civil society employees.

The note below includes some thoughts we had prepared, as well as things we learned from people at the meeting. It outlines why we conclude that the stakeholder discourse, and the practices that go along with it, are in fact part of an order that functions to exclude and silence. For those at the meeting who came from grassroots formations, it was clear that this approach fitted very much with their analysis and experience. Summarising their key points, it was said that the stakeholder approaches exclude, enslave, silence and demobilise. The combined effect is to try and reduce their struggles to what can be managed within the terms set by the rich and powerful.

STAKEHOLDERS = THOSE WHO COUNT and EMANCIPATORY POLITICS = MADE BY THE UNCOUNTED

By definition, stakeholders must mean those people or groups who are recognised as having a stake in something. Part of CLP's evolving way of understanding the world we're in has meant moving decisively away from the assumption that we get toward good praxis by analysing, and working with, relations with 'stakeholders'. It's not that we think stakeholders don't matter – on the contrary, they constitute 'what is' and they therefore affect a lot of things that people have to deal with. But they cannot constitute spaces for a liberatory politics. The 'stakeholders' are those who are counted and who are qualified to speak – their counting, qualifications and speaking being constituted by and within the terms of the existant order (of 'the police' as Rancier would have it). A liberatory politics is the opposite – it is precisely the disruption of those terms by those who are not counted, not qualified, and therefore, should not be speaking. In short: naming the stakeholders is in order – liberatory praxis is the 'out of order' of those who do not qualify to be stakeholders.

Are Africa and South America destined to be 'resource-rich underachievers', or can knowledge intensification change all that? 'Resource Intensity, Knowledge and Development: Insights from Africa and South America' was launched at the Cape Town Book Fair 2008 in a public discussion between academic, researcher and volume editor Dr Jo Lorentzen and UCT sociologist Professor David Cooper, where the two speakers shared their views on recent resource-based development and the global economy debates.

On Walter Turner's . Unfortunately the transition from rebellion and revolution to good governance is extremely difficult for any people. The Chinese nation has accomplished much in the last one hundred years but still many have been left behind. In South Africa majority rule has not resulted in all that was hoped for.

Hopefully the neoliberal economic model will soon be abandoned and the people at the bottom will reap more benefits of the struggle. Otherwise their leadership will turn out like our Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, etc.

is a well written article. I remember way back when I was young, we used to be asked in class, "what would you like to be when you grow up?" Most everyone would say they wanted to be teachers or lawyers; Many a times my answer would elicit sharp glances from the teachers: A writer, I would say. "You need to get more practical Judy. What would you have of interest to tell to the world? If I were you, I would aspire to be a nurse, now thats a noble profession."

Anyway, I shouldn't put my having not penned anything substantial to-date to negativity by teachers etc; frankly it might be more to laziness, but all in all, it is hard to produce an African writer with all those negative vibes.

It's just been a few weeks since Nelson Mandela was taken off the United States terrorism watch list. No doubt so that they too could join in the celebrations of this living icon, without the embarrassment of hoisting up a revolutionary.

I gather that a revolutionary in America is, someone, not quite viewed through the same rose-tinted lens worn by us Southerners.

Mandela made the cover of Time Magazine again this week. It's his fourth time on the cover. I couldn't resist picking it up as I walked past the magazine rack at the local store, knowing well that I was going to be presented with yet another romantic glorification of his role as reconciler.

Not that I disagree with the sentiment. I join the rest of the world in praising the power of his peacemaking in our deeply divided nation. But Mandela is my hero for a few different reasons too. There is much more to our beloved leader than the image of the sanitised reconciler we've been fed since his release from prison.