Category: Blog

A weekly round-up of must-read stories, posted every Friday ...

The progress made by Congo activists earlier this month in the state of California, the city of St. Petersburg, FL, and most recently at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is part of a dynamic conflict-free movement that is spreading across the nation. While each of these efforts is unique in its approach, collectively they are making a strong statement to companies sourcing minerals from eastern Congo to clean up their supply chains, and they are strengthening the support behind the federal legislation ...

After interning for Enough, Stefani Jones returned to Duke this fall with the goal of kick-starting a conflict-free student group on campus. In her guest post she tells about the successes the Coalition for a Conflict-Free Duke has had so far ...

At an event focused on food security this week, Vice President Biden emphasized the role of the militant group al-Shabaab in exacerbating the famine in Somalia. But less often emphasized is the role that Somalia’s transitional government is playing in hindering the delivery of aid to those in need. “Given the bizarre and extremist behavior of Shabaab, it is not clear that the West and the United Nations can realistically do much to help the 500,000 famine victims trapped in territory under its control,” writes Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus in a new paper for Enough. “But there is no excuse ...

I lost my dear friend Howard Wolpe yesterday. Many of you might not know that name, but he was one of the heroes of making U.S. policy toward Africa more compassionate ...

The Dear Hillary Campaign for the Congo is a network of students and activists dedicated to advocating for peace in eastern Congo. The campaign was started at St. Michael’s College in Vermont to call on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to step up as a leader for peace in Congo. This post was written by St. Michael’s student and Dear Hillary Campaign leader Leah Ziegler ...

The United Nations Group of Experts on Congo wrote to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to say, in sum, “Since the signing into law of the Dodd Frank act, a higher proportion then before of tin, tungsten and tantalum mined in the DRC is not funding conflict.” This is a significant statement, coming from an internationally mandated group that has done in-depth research at hundreds of mines across eastern Congo over the past year ...

Guest bloggers Rachel Gore and Emma Craig, members of the STAND chapter at Clark University, recently marked a major victory in their Congo advocacy efforts and wrote this post to explain how they pulled it off ...

For months, Ryan Boyette’s name and his presence in the Nuba Mountains remained a closely-held detail, never mentioned in public reporting about the atrocities that have been unfolding in the area since June. But as Enough’s Jonathan Hutson noted to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for his Sunday column, Boyette is “irreplaceable” through his role as a rare foreign witness to the Sudanese government’s aerial bombardments and ground attacks ...

Joshua Dysart is a comic book writer who, after learning about the Lord’s Resistance Army, was inspired to base a series of comic books in northern Uganda to help spread awareness about the group and the communities it is has affected ...