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“... model social state of the kind that we are trying to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the International CrisisGroup, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall ...”

“... not long before the town was occupied. His friends murmured agreement. They felt betrayed by an international community that has witnessed numerous peace agreements on Sudan yet fails to act when their conditions are breached. ‘Why is Bashir stronger than the international community? Where is the power above ...”

“... as an opportunity to further its policies of separation and fragmentation, and to deflect growing international pressure for an end to an occupation that has lasted nearly half a century. Its massive assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9 (Operation Cast Lead) and 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defence), as well as countless individual attacks between and ...”

“... are here now, so please don’t ask.’ Things are certainly very bad in the Gaza Strip. The fuel crisis grinds on, and though Israel has just allowed a small consignment of fuel in, nearly 90 per cent of private cars remain off the road. Bus and taxi services are overwhelmed, and since the taxis have more than doubled their rates, most of us are still ...”

“... Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for Radio France International and Libération, based in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The day before the assassination I got a call from Sankara. This was a first. We knew each other well but, until then, his aide had always called me before putting the president on the line. This ...”

“... The first anecdotal evidence that Aids-related illness and death were contributing to a crisis in African farming came in the mid-1980s; the first consultants’ reports and academic studies were completed by about 1990. But even the international agencies that sponsored these studies, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Department for International Development, somehow ignored the findings when designing their assistance programmes ...”

“... collapse of the long-lasting dictatorship of Suharto in 1998, together with the Asian financial crisis, battered Indonesia’s economy and released the cork that had kept contained religious, ethnic, class and other divisions in this very diverse archipelago. The result was political and social meltdown. The economy, already in a worse state ...”

“... arrange a timetable for American withdrawal, and go some way towards ending the worsening economic crisis. None of these is likely to happen soon because, regardless of the result of the election, real power in Iraq is still largely held by the US. The interim government cannot even hold a press conference unless it is protected by American machine-gunners ...”

“... of intermediaries between the state and its citizens who could have negotiated an end to the crisis. Both countries’ supposed stability was dependent on a strategic relationship with the West. Tunisia enjoyed a warm and privileged relationship with Paris: it was reassuring for the French, angst-ridden about the growing visibility of their Muslim ...”

“... world supposes. But they have always been way ahead of the government in their access to the international media. Whatever the uprising has since become it began in March 2011 as a mass revolt against a cruel and corrupt police state. The regime at first refused to say much in response, then sounded aggrieved and befuddled as it saw the vacuum it had ...”

“... West Africa, jihadist movements are spreading like the desert, from north to south,’ the International CrisisGroup warned in December 2019. It predicted a growing ‘risk of jihadist contagion’ that could spread to West Africa’s more fertile, prosperous coastal states, including Côte d’Ivoire and ...”

“... someone’s brains out.’ Eight days later, on 3 March 2021, security forces opened fire on a group of protesters in the city of Monywa, in central Myanmar. K Za Win was among them. A bullet hit him behind the ear. ‘Skulls’ seems prophetic, but K Za Win – a former monk and political prisoner – wasn’t writing about himself. On 1 February, hours ...”

“... sixty years ago when Nasser survived British, French and Israeli attack during the Suez crisis, are once again the dependencies of global or regional powers, a fact underlined earlier this year when Egypt handed over to Saudi Arabia two islands in the Red Sea which it had long held as part of its national territory. From north-east Nigeria all the ...”

“... and we have forgotten how to think in politico-economic categories. Hence the prolonged crisis of managed welfare capitalism in which the Western world has been engulfed since the early 1970s, and which has provoked a strange, atavistic neo-liberal counter-revolution against the Keynesian social democracy of the 1950s and 1960s. Socially and ...”

“... fought. He went to Sirte, where Gaddafi’s forces were making a last stand, and joined a militia group from Misrata. He had no military experience, as far as I know, but he didn’t flinch during bombardments and was stoical when he was caught in an ambush and wounded by shrapnel from a mortar bomb, and the militiamen were impressed. On 8 October his ...”