Teju Cole has a new blog for The New Inquiry. From his second entry: The niqab is illegal in Belgium (as it is in France): adult Muslim women may not, of their own free will, cover their faces in public. In the words of the liberal MP who proposed the ban in Belgium: “Wearing the… Read More »
In London Review of Books: Laurent Gbagbo was born in 1945 in the so-called ‘cocoa loop’ in the south-west. ‘When I went to school, rural Ivory Coast was still subdivided into military “circles” which were administered by French officers,’ he told me when I interviewed him in June 2009. ‘The economy was entirely in French… Read More »
If you’ve ever crossed borders in most of Europe – at the airport, by ferry or by road – you know that you don’t get ‘controlled’ as you enter the next country. That is about to change. To blame, claim France and Italy, is the Arab Spring. So many people are fleeing North Africa to… Read More »
Sometime last week I attended a podium discussion at the Berlin Humboldt University. The topic was Africa as the laboratory of globalisation. The idea was to discuss different ways in which Africa serves as a laboratory for ideas that then travel to other parts of the world. Some of those on the podium are STS… Read More »
Senegalese economist Sanou Mbaye on some of the problems French West African countries have been facing since independence: On the monetary front, the CFA Franc Zone’s member countries dismantled the federal structure that united them [French West Africa and French Central Africa] during French occupation and erected trade barriers instead. The CFA franc issued by… Read More »
POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS FOR RESEARCH ON ‘THE HUMAN ECONOMY’ UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria invites applications from suitably-qualified researchers for Post-Doctoral Fellowships to contribute to an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Human Economy’. People always insert themselves practically into economic life on their own account. But what they… Read More »
Stephen Smith writes in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine about the relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa. One of the things he looks at is what has changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and what has not. There is a little about the economic relations, but I miss a… Read More »
Mr Roger Cohen of the New York Times writes in his column: A strong Europe is essential to America’s recovery. The United States is too stretched — militarily and economically — to do without the cohesion of its closest allies. There are three major European powers: Britain, France and Germany. Britain is going through a… Read More »