Politics

The 2006 election in the Democratic Republic of Congo was supposed to usher in a new period of peace and stability for the beleaguered, exhausted Congolese people. Instead, it made one of the country's most intractable problems worse. After the election, the small but powerful Tutsi community in Eastern Congo...

The Himalayan foothills of northern Myanmar form the ancestral homeland of the Kachins, an ethnic group that has endured decades of brutal repression at the hands of the Burmese military. Starting in 1962, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) waged a low-grade insurgency against the Burmese military. Today, a tenuous...

How does an affluent First World nation-state go from stability to near social collapse in the space of a week? What prompts a generation characterized by political apathy to flood into the streets? Why does a nouveaux-riche country with a slowing growth rate express its frustration with such violent...

For much of the world Cambodia brings to mind the horrors of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. And because progress is assumed to have taken place in the three decades since, the world tends to overlook the state of affairs there today.

But contemporary Cambodia continues to...

The war between Russia and Georgia caught most of the world by surprise but it is a conflict that has long been brewing – and one that is part of a larger drama. The bigger context is Russia's attempt to regain the influence it enjoyed during the years of...

The poorest nation in the Arab world struggles with high population growth, 40% unemployment and a persistent flow of refugees from Somalia. In the next decade, its 22 million citizens will compete for increasingly scarce water supplies, as aquifers are drilled, pumped and drained unsustainably.

This is...

In almost three decades of rule, Robert Mugabe's evolution from liberator to tyrant led Zimbabwe from democratic independence and its status as South Africa's breadbasket to a one-party state with an inflation rate over 231 million percent. Mugabe met early electoral wins by the opposition party Movement for Democratic...

In April 2008 Nepal turned a corner. More than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for elections to choose a new government tasked with abolishing the monarchy and forging a stable republic after a decade-long insurgency that claimed over 13,000 lives. Despite pre-election violence and intimidation, international observers...

Chevron is accused of having dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest, and local residents are determined to hold them accountable.

"Iraq: Death of a Nation" examines how the U.S. invasion and occupation created a multi-faceted civil war in which the U.S. is now actively arming multiple factions. Last summer, the project focused on how Iraq's refugee crisis was created by the invasion and the fighting that has followed. This...

On the surface, Iran is simply a theocracy in a standoff with the United States. But access to the everyday lives of Iranians gives a window into the country's complex web of culture, religion and politics. Despite decades of repressive leadership, Iran arguably has the longest-lived democratic movement in...

Oil and gas finds are turning the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains and the adjacent Amazonian lowlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia into a hydrocarbon hotspot.