· March, 2014

Stories about International Relations from March, 2014

Should Africa Learn From the Crimea Referendum?

  28 March 2014

“Is Crimea referendum a good model for Africa?” asks Richard Dowden: Africa’s arbitrary borders, mostly drawn by people who had never set foot in the continent, have always been an obvious target for renegotiation. But Africa’s first rulers, who foresaw chaos and disintegration if the nation states were reconfigured, ruled...

Why Filipinos Became Early Adopters of Western Music

  26 March 2014

Le Minh Khai refers to the book of D. R. M. Irving in explaining the long history of Filipino musicians playing Western music: …there was a rich experience of musical contact and exchange between Spaniards and Filipinos that began not long after the Spaniards established their control over the Philippines...

750 Million People Expected to Speak French by 2050

  25 March 2014

Countering the assertion by John McWhorter at the New republic that learning French is pointless, Pascal Emmanuel Gobry  writes on his Forbes blog that French might just be the language of the future: French isn’t mostly spoken by French people, and hasn’t been for a long time now. The language is...

Returning Human Remains is Not an Apology, Says Namibia to Germany

  24 March 2014

Human remains who were killed during the colonial war (early 20th century) were returned to Namibia by Germany in March. However, Namibians still demand a formal apology from the German government as Tendai Marima,  a post-doctoral researcher in African literature, wrote on the Think Africa Press website : The skulls and skeletons that...

The Daily Lives of Sub-Saharan Immigrants in Prague

  21 March 2014

Chadian blogger Réndodjo Em-A Moundona [fr] writes about the daily lives of African immigrants in Prague [fr] :  Une petite discussion avec ces Africains suffit pour se rendre à l´évidence que la communauté n´est ni menacée, ni totalement intégrée. Comme fille africaine, il est quasi impossible de trouver un travail conséquent [..] En général, les...