What is the value of America’s military and humanitarian interventions? Just look at Mali: Its shattered democracy and roving rebel groups are a troubling picture of an AFRICOM partner state.

Unlike the Biafra experience, indigenous peoples confronting land dispossession are looking beyond the nation-state for justice.

Thanks to international advocacy, attempts by Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Obiang to sponsor a UNESCO prize have been thwarted. Abena Ampofoa Asare examines how, despite a dreadful human rights record, Obiang has managed to avoid international condemnation for so long.

Following a controversial ruling by US Judge José A. Cabranes of the Manhattan-based federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals that transnational corporations ‘cannot be held responsible for torture, genocide, war crimes and the like’, Abena Ampofoa Asare discusses the challenges for establishing responsibility and valuing human rights over profit.

Following the al-Shabaab bombing in Kampala, current plans to send more AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia) troops into Somalia will simply jeopardise the possibility of a new moderate leadership emerging in the country, writes Abena Ampofoa Asare. Observers in the African Union, UN and international community at large would do well to look at Somaliland to the north, the author stresses. Solutions to Somalia’s civil war will not emerge in Kampala, Washington DC or Addis Ababa, Asare contends, underlining that a key lesson of Somaliland’s experience is that ‘effective government must come from within’.

cc State-sanctioned witch-hunts in March have triggered growing popular criticism of Gambia’s repressive Jammeh government on the ground as well as internationally, writes Abena Ampofoa Asare. Detailing the failure of regional and continental mechanisms from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) to respond effectively to human-rights abuses in a deteriorating political situation, Asare calls for the issue to be addressed at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights annual meeting on 13 May.