Opinion

The West’s problem is that it is wholly unwilling to fight for a big common cause COMMENT | SLAVOJ ZIZEK |   The downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria surprised even the opposition, led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, offering fertile ground for conspiracy theories. What roles did Israel, …

  COMMENT | ANDREW GALLUCI |  Amid the recent maelstrom of political news was an important development for the future of technology-enabled public money. During the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, the Bank for International Settlements revealed that it was withdrawing from the digital-asset and payments initiative Project mBridge. Conceived in 2022 as a …

COMMENT | CHRIS PATTEN |  I first visited Japan as a young member of the UK Parliament in the early 1980s. Yukio Satoh, an ambitious and forward-thinking diplomat who would later serve as Japan’s ambassador to the United Nations, had recently been posted to the country’s London embassy. Recognizing that the …

The costs and consequences of American primacy on a continent that gave birth to the modern world THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | By 1900, there was no part of this planet that was not directly (or somewhat indirectly) ruled from a European capital – London, Paris, The Hague, Berlin, Rome, …

What accounts for Vice President Kamala Harris’s disappointing electoral performance, especially with working-class voters? COMMENT | DANI RODRIK |  As US president, Joe Biden charted a new economic path for the Democrats by siding unabashedly with the working class and introducing a wide range of industrial policies to reinvigorate manufacturing, reshore supply chains, …

COMMENT | Gertrude Kamya Othieno | Uganda’s allure, both spiritually and culturally, has been growing ever since the days of the East African Revival, and this magnetic force is not just felt within East Africa but extends well beyond its borders. Uganda’s distinctive cultural and spiritual heritage, embodied in its agricultural practices …

COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | This is familiar territory. Opposition strongman Kizza Besigye is back in the news headlines, with yet another court case hanging over him; feels like a homecoming. There was a time when the media would breathlessly report about state security forces arresting and manhandling Besigye. The slightest …

How Uganda’s opposition leader turned himself into a warmongering power-hungry politician THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | In a sting operation, Uganda’s Chieftaincy of Defense Intelligence and Security (CDIS), formerly the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), kidnapped Dr. Kiiza Besigye from Nairobi. Besigye is a leading figure in opposition politics, the …

OPINION | Brenda Mpoora | Kaka Mbabazi feels more in control of her life these days. She turned 73 at the beginning of this year and has never owned a bank account. Until June this year, when her granddaughter Patience signed her onto PostBank’s Wendi mobile platform in addition to registering …

COMMENT | TMS RUGE |  For those not paying attention, new EU organic certification requirements of all supply chains have effectively killed off Ugandan agriculture exports into the European Union. For example, organic certification has been a necessary certification for export of our Moringa powder and for a while it …