Journalists and policy analysts should spend more time reading history. If they did, they would be better placed to challenge the diplomats and politicians who casually requisition the past in order to lay claim to …
Articles by: "Stuart Doran"
Elizabeth II may have had her annus horribilis in the early 1990s, but she would—in the minds of many South Africans, at least—be thought to have escaped lightly. The ‘rainbow nation’ went to the polls …
It’s like watching a drunken sailor go down in increments. A stumble, a forehead to the counter, a wild grasping, followed by a crash of bottles. That’s the trajectory of Zimbabwe’s post-Mugabe ‘new dispensation’—all in …
Editors’ picks for 2018: ‘South Africa in crisis (part 3): failure will impact Africa and the world’
Originally published 3 October 2018. Whether South Africa is teetering or slowly crumbling is moot. But one thing’s clear: the country faces a raft of intersecting crises that it is ill-equipped to solve. And the …
A year on from the coup that ousted Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe remains perched between piecemeal reform and old ways that are as intractable as they are destructive. That’s because the country is ruled by a …
Whether South Africa is teetering or slowly crumbling is moot. But one thing’s clear: the country faces a raft of intersecting crises that it is ill-equipped to solve. And the world’s inattention doesn’t mean it’s …
The bad news for South Africa just keeps getting worse. The latest macroeconomic figures show that GDP shrank for the second quarter in a row, meaning the country has technically entered a recession for the …
Focused on big events and inconsequential forms of entertainment, the West’s news media have never been good at reading international trends—still less in this age of presidential tweets and micro attention spans. And Africa fares …
Another Zimbabwean election, another Zanu-PF victory, another cry of ‘foul’. And another pile of bodies. The more things change, the more they stay the same in the southern African nation. Or so it seems. As …
Sino-African relations have been of increasing interest to analysts since the turn of the century—in large part because the relationship is a measure of how the Chinese hope to use their burgeoning economic power in …
In the 38 years since the end of colonial rule, Zimbabwe has never held an election in which Robert Mugabe has failed to participate—or win. The country gets its first chance in combined presidential and …