Robert I. Rotberg

Robert I. Rotberg is Fulbright Research Professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

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Robert I. Rotberg's Latest Posts

Africa’s coming rough years

| January 24, 2022 | 0 Comments
Africa’s coming rough years

The years 2020 and 2021 were tough and worrying years for Africa and Africans. Will 2022 prove better and more life sustaining? The COVID-19 pandemic set Africa’s development back in 2021 by at least 10 years, according to the World Bank. In addition to soaring case rates everywhere, but especially in South Africa in 2021, […]

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Hope and hopelessness in Africa

| October 16, 2021 | 0 Comments
Hope and hopelessness in Africa

Hakainde Hichilema’s resounding victory in Zambia’s August presidential poll proves that Africans can abandon identity preferences, resist intimidation by an incumbent regime and oust a sitting autocrat accustomed to rigging elections. Voters in that one southern African country removed president Edgar Lungu, a despot who had increasingly brutalized opponents, curtailed free speech and assembly and […]

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Paul Kagame: Rwanda’s despot?

| July 9, 2021 | 0 Comments
Paul Kagame: Rwanda’s despot?

Luring Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda, to Kigali to be tried for “treason” for opposing the regime of President Paul Kagame is hardly the first “clever” Lukashenko-like entrapment of Rwandans who dare to criticize the tight-fisted manner in which Kagame has run his otherwise oft-praised African government. Much earlier, thugs sent by Kagame […]

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Quelling Africa’s apocalypse

| April 25, 2021 | 0 Comments
Quelling Africa’s apocalypse

The horsemen of the apocalypse are galloping through Africa. There is abundant war, in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria and Somalia. There is pestilence and plague, with locusts swarming across northeastern and eastern Africa and the coronavirus, with its dangerous variants, […]

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Canada could host global tribunal

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
Canada could host global tribunal

When global human rights activists and international affairs strategists campaigned for a new international tribunal to help to prevent future Rwandan genocides and other outrages, Canada was in the vanguard of those writing and creating the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Likewise, when a similar cohort of important parties gathered together […]

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What Biden should do in Africa

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
What Biden should do in Africa

U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken have not yet decided who will be in charge of Africa policy-making, but we already know that the nations of Africa will be respected, befriended and hardly consigned to the lavatory and schoolboy lavatory talk. Biden has travelled to Africa multiple times. Blinken, on Biden’s […]

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Two steps forward; one step back

| October 31, 2020 | 0 Comments
Two steps forward; one step back

Autocrats, even democrats, always find it hard to give up office — especially in Africa. Likewise, no matter how often the African Union condemns military coups and sanctifies elected heads of state, soldiers oust politicians and refuse to stay in their barracks. Equally, there are authoritarians who abuse and assassinate their opponents, squelch those who […]

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COVID-19 hits Africa

| August 2, 2020 | 0 Comments
COVID-19 hits Africa

Despite a woeful medical infrastructure, widespread disease, food insecurity and crowded urban slums, much of Africa — compared to the Americas and Europe — has largely been spared a wrenching public-health disturbance from this year’s raging coronavirus. So far. At the same time, economies throughout the continent have tanked and Africans have been thrown back […]

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Wanted: An anti-corruption court

| April 3, 2020 | 0 Comments
Wanted: An anti-corruption court

Kleptocracy destroys countries from within. Kleptocrats turn sometime democracies into criminal states that plunder national resources and national patrimonies, depriving citizens of their rights, their tax revenues and their ability to determine policy priorities. A cacophony of African states — Angola, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, South Africa, […]

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Africa’s healthier than ever

| January 2, 2020 | 0 Comments
Africa’s healthier than ever

Africa’s current one billion or so residents are healthier than they have ever been, thanks to medical science, special attention to chronic disease remediation in several key countries and the efforts of several American philanthropic enterprises. Life expectancies are up and morbidity is mostly down, allowing Africans to work more productively, enjoy more leisure and […]

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