If you work in the universe of international affairs and also happen to live under a rock, you might have missed the hundreds of headlines this past week lamenting the abject failure of the Rio+20 sustainable development summit. Fifty thousand-plus folks gathered in Rio to figure out how to finally make sustainable development work, and…
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plans are in (!), although not all 55 OGP member countries have submitted theirs, and only some plans were submitted in the electronic format we had hoped for. But with more than 40 plans to analyze, we took the first deep dive into finally making some sense of this…
I recently watched “Inception” again, a film considered Christopher Nolan’s cinematic masterpiece, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and his peers enter people’s minds and “steer” reality the way they wish. To be quite honest, I am not particularly enchanted by the character development in the movie, but there is something haunting about their ability to go…
In Ukraine, not everyone gets the same treatment. This disparity is most visible in the country’s judicial system. Reporter Vlad Lavrov explains through the stories of leading opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who was convicted for abuse of power, and current President Viktor Yanukovych’s friends, who faces murder charges. Read the story here. The story is…
This weekend, the travel blog Gadling posted a terrific story describing how the Ethiopian government has blocked access to Skype across the country. This isn't the first time Ethiopia has cracked down on internet access and imposed online censorship; we've been tracking the issue for years across a range of countries around the world, including…
On the African continent we watch time and again as boot-clad military walk through the doors of a National Assembly, a president’s bedroom or the streets of a capital city and declare ownership over the land. This classic coup d’état scenario most recently took place in Mali. Despite the fact that public administration and service…