By RENÉ LEFORT I Open Democracy The history of this country is one of eternal recurrence. The ‘national question” re-emerges where it has always been, with varying degrees of visibility: at the heart of Ethiopian political life. steamroller has flattened everything in its way. The opposition held one seat in the outgoing parliament. It will not hold a…
Washington wants a stable partner in the Horn of Africa. But cozying up to the repressive regime in Addis Ababa isn’t the way to go about finding one. BY JEFFREY SMITH, MOHAMMED ADEMO Later this month, President Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to ever visit Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country, and…
By Roel van der Veen, for Addis Standard Development in the non-Western world In the 1870s Japanese public intellectual Yukichi Fukuzawa shocked his audience by stating that he thought Japan should leave poor Asia and join the modern world. Japan in those days was going through a phase of rapid change, which would eventually lead…