Port-au-Prince’s Territories

After one of the most nail-biting weeks since the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, Mohammed Morsy, was recognised as Egypt’s new President, the first in the country’s history to be voted in through genuinely competitive elections. This is doubtlessly a momentous...

"FRANCE HAS A NEW PRESIDENT." It does not look like much of a statement on paper, or on a computer screen: five little words, almost too short for a tweet. But France today is still dazed from the news, floating between disbelief, relief and exhaustion.

From Guernica: In Liberia, loyalty matters. When Weah ran for president in 2005, he said he’d try to seek justice for Doe’s murder. Weah campaigned heavily in the southeast, including Grand Gedeh. At a rally in Doe’s home village of Tuzon, Doe’s sister Edith grabbed the microphone. “We’ll never...

by Isaac Fitzgerald I came to this city in love and with everything I owned stuffed into three bags — it was San Francisco, so six people in a three-bedroom apartment seemed like something that could work. But when a week turned into a month she said maybe I...

Afghanistan is a land of paradox. The investment that has been poured into the country by the West in the last decade will be the largest in Afghanistan’s history, and yet a portion of its people are engaged in a protracted insurgency that squanders this golden opportunity.

From the Roads to Arabia exhibition, Pergamon Museum, Berlin From Sign and Sight: Archaeological exhibitions at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum have had an unprecedentedly successful year. “Tell Halaf” attracted 750,000 visitors, “Pergamon” sold 250,000 tickets in just two months and “Roads of Arabia” opened on January 26th. The more confusing...

There’s a cartoon character that all French children watched in the '70s and ‘80s, Calimero. He was a little black chick who, ever provoking trouble, always ended up defeated and complaining, “it’s really so unfair!” when in reality, he was usually the architect of his own misfortunes. At times,...

Student protest in Quebec, March 22, 2012. Photograph by Tina Mailhot-Roberge by Justin E. H. Smith On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as “the biggest student uprising you’ve never heard of.” This movement,...

Towards the end of last year, as the Eurozone crisis was reaching (yet another) climax, a number of journalists in the German quality press alerted their readers to an aspect of the crisis which had received scant attention so far: the euro crisis marked not only the failure of...

During my thesis research in the communities of Saban and Huay Max, located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, I watched how children from three different familial units living on the same housing lot were constantly reorganized and re-circulated as adult family members came and went.

Persepolis, Briton Rivière by Gregory Jusdanis Many travelers still seek solitude among the tourists, the luxury to communicate personally with the ruins. They long to leave their minds on idle, while they enter the vista before them, undisturbed by the other souls striving for the same illusion. I often...

Lahore ring road. Photograph from Google Earth. by Manan Ahmed You can’t see through cement – and neither can I. When I look at Lahore and the ways in which cement has cordoned off sight-lines, I see a city full of people blind-folded. The gated communities were the first...

From The Walrus: At the end of the meal, I’d given the waiter CUC $80 and received CUC $10 in change, and as I stood there with the ten-peso note in my hand Antonio grabbed and pocketed it. I shot him a confused look, and he responded with a half shrug...

All over east-central Africa, for several centuries, there has been tension between two ways of life that have also been two human silhouettes: the tall, graceful cattle-people and the shorter, sturdier agriculturalists. They have different names in different places, but in Rwanda and Burundi they are the Tutsi and...

The aftermath of Operation Condor. Washington, September 21, 1976 From Dublin Review of Books: The morning of September 21st, 1976 was unusually dull. Rain had been forecast. I was in my office on the second floor of the Irish embassy, occasionally looking out on the tranquillity of Sheridan Circle...

It is the received view – a view that took root that fateful evening at Fouquet’s restaurant, the evening of his victory over his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in May 2007 – that Nicolas Sarkozy as President between 2007 and 2012 betrayed de Gaulle’s République de grandeur, replacing it...