Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.
In The Post-Colonial Hangover, Foreign Policy’s Josh Keating sums up some recent research on the role that specific brands of colonialism—British, French, Portuguese—had on the stability, prosperity, and governance of today’s independent countries.
PRI’s The World featured an interview with Delly Sesete about why he is calling on Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone by 2013. Host Marco Werman covered some topics that others haven’t in the media storm set off by Sesete’s popular Change.org petition. Does Sesete himself own a smart-phone? “Buying a smart-phone is like buying a bullet,” Sesete said.
Associate Director for Sustainable Security at the Center for American Progress Sarah Margon blogged about the significance of a recent move by a Minnesota bank to close down its money transfer service to Somalia. The move by Sunrise Community Banks, which operates in a part of the country with the largest Somalia diaspora network, comes over concerns that the remittances people send to family members in Somalia could put the bank on the wrong side of U.S. terrorism financing laws. But with many in Somalia dependent on those payments from family overseas, imprecise U.S. laws “won’t make us any safer, but (…) may contribute to greater instability in Somalia," Margon writes.
With the recent opening of Angelina Jolie’s Golden Globe nominated film “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” Gayle Tzemach Lemmon of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote this oped for CNN about the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and yet the minimal role they have in peace processes.
Kenya’s Business Daily profiled self-declared “Afropean”—technically Congolese-Belgian—rapper Baloji Tshiani, whose fascination with American and French hip-hop while living in Belgium evolved when he reconnected with his mother back in Congo. The piece describes the making of the music video for “Karibu Ya Bintou (Welcome to life in Limbo),” which Baloji shot in the streets of Kinshasa: