The Civil War and the Refugee Crisis in Liberia
On the eve of the twenty-first century, one of the greatest challenges and troubling phenomena facing the world is an increasing number of refugees, of whom there are about 18 million. The refugee problem has recently assumed international significance due to exploding refugee population movements. The global refugee problem is a subject of international concern as it affects Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. It is a particularly serious problem in Africa where the refugee population on the continent represents about 50 percent of the world's refugees, surpassing even the population of some individual African nations. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Liberia have generated the largest numbers of refugees.
THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND COLONIALISM: REASONS FOR AFRICA’S UNDERDEVELOPMENT?
It is probably an understatement to assert that Africa, the world’s second largest continent, is underdeveloped compared with other continents. Two major exogenous factors often cited for Africa’s development crisis are the so called ‘dual historical injustices’ – the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. It is often pointed out that while the former almost completely arrested and retarded Africa’s demographical growth for more than three centuries, evoked a perennial state of acrimony and warfare and created a tense and unprecedented atmosphere of insecurity which hindered economic activities and stifled local entrepreneurship and technological drive and dislocated Africa’s socio-economic and political structures and institutions; the latter tied African countries to the apron strings of western imperial powers thereby rendering the pre-conditions necessary for socio-economic and political transformation unachievable. This paper contends that while the history of Africa’s underdevelopment may be traceable to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, African leaders had made enormous contributions to the continent’s underdevelopment and backwardness. The paper concludes that irresponsible and irresponsive leadership, vampirism and prodigality, corruption, lack of respect for democratic ideals, insecurity, endemic civil wars, nepotism, etc are the fundamental causes of Africa’s underdevelopment.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1