Blog

We here at Enough love gorillas, elephants and people. As part of its Planet in Peril series, CNN sent correspondent Lisa Ling to southeastern Chad to report on the illegal poaching of elephants in the region. Stories from her trip received significant airtime on both American Morning and Anderson Cooper 360, two of the network's most popular programs. Such poaching is a grave problem and is demonstrative of the rampant illegal exploitation of natural resources in the region. However, discussing violence against animals in Chad without any mention of the alarming banditry problems and ongoing political instability in the country ...

The recent pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have piqued international interest in the state of anarchy in Somalia. The African Union has requested that the UN take over the African Union Mission in Somalia, and while this option has been shelved for the moment, it is worth examining lessons learned from other UN take-overs of regional missions. The UN has on several occasions taken over regional missions, with Liberia and Darfur are prime examples. However, while some may think substituting a UN peacekeeping mission in replacement of under-staffed and under-funded regional missions will dramatically improve the situation, this ...

A good article in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs by former President of the American Foreign Service Association J. Anthony Holmes advocates dramatically increasing the number of Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). Holmes offers some powerful statistics: The number of lawyers at the Defense Department is larger than the entire U.S. diplomatic corps, there are more musicians in the military bands than there are U.S. diplomats, and the Defense Department’s 2008 budget was over 24 times as large as the combined budgets of the State Department and USAID ($750 billion compared with $31 billion). Enough made similar calls for reform ...

Peacekeeping is rarely easy, but it is almost never effective when regional organizations try to do ‘peace on the cheap.’ In Liberia in the early 1990s, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) was forced to rely heavily on Nigeria for both financing and troops. Soldiers were not only poorly equipped, but under-fed and under-paid. ECOMOG then took seven years to disarm Taylor’s rebels and organize elections, which were won by none other than Charles Taylor himself. Darfur’s vast land area and huge numbers of IDPs simply overwhelmed the insufficiently-numbered African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) troops, ...

A recent State Department map highlights the relationship between systems of justice and cases of violence against women around the world. The map usefully illustrates how ending what the Enough and others have called a “culture of impunity” is essential to halting the horrific epidemics of gender-based violence occurring today in places like eastern Congo. In Congo, law enforcement as we know it is nonexistent, and access to justice is near impossible for women who survive brutal acts of sexual violence. Congolese women and girls are afraid to report these abuses for fear that they will be attacked by the ...

During a recent Symposium on Preventive Priorities at the Council on Foreign Relations, Adjunct Fellow for Africa Michelle Gavin rightly argued that, “Robust, intensive diplomacy,” and “A real understanding of…incentives and disincentives,” must be the hallmarks of American foreign policy. The fact that Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) is now in trouble underscores Gavin’s point. As John Prendergast and John Norris note: The CPA itself—the agreement to end the 22-year war in southern Sudan and establish a framework for democratic transformation of the country—was reached in 2005 after a sustained investment in diplomacy, led in part by the United States ...

As John Norris mentioned above, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed her “real regrets” over the U.S. failure to end the genocide in Darfur on Meet the Press. In a November New York Times interview, she said the same thing: One of the real regrets I’ve had is that we haven’t been able to do something about Sudan…Now, it’s true, we’ve been able to do a lot about the humanitarian situation. We’ve even been able to support getting some peacekeepers onto the ground; and where there are peacekeepers, there’s less violence. But we could’ve done so much more... Condi is ...

In a chilling Washington Post op-ed, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden called Somalia a “laboratory for anarchy,” an apt description for a country that has simmered on the brink of chaos off and on—but mostly on—for the past eighteen years. Lacking a functioning central government since 1991, Somalia has played host to regional proxy wars, warlord politics, and more recently pirates and Islamist extremism in the form of a ruthless militia known as the Shabaab. Bowden’s op-ed highlights the grim realities of what happens when the international community simply gives up on a failed state. In Mogadishu (and undoubtedly ...

The New York Times recently reported on a troubling development in Darfur’s refugee camps: the presence of “angry and outspoken,” even “extreme” youths who are collectively calling themselves the “shabaab,” the Arabic word for “young men.” These young men are challenging traditional sheiks and elders, in some cases violently; 11 sheiks have been killed in and around refugee camps in the Zalingei region of West Darfur since early 2007. Although the cases are unsolved, many suspect that shabaab involvement. As the Times article remarked, the growing youth militia adds a new and complicating dynamic to any peace efforts in Darfur ...

Journalist Rob Crilly’s African Safari blog is becoming a must-bookmark for his combination of first-rate reporting and acerbic wit. Visit for the on-the-ground perspective on the LRA’s activities in northeast Congo, stay for the hilarious predictions about Africa in 2009 (my favorite: Somali pirates buy Djibouti, launch bid for 2020 Olympics) and the useful field guide to the continent’s malt beverages. One qualm: Crilly does not do nearly enough justice to Liberia’s infamous Club lager; a public health specialist once told me he was convinced this beer causes malaria ...