Special Reports

The Arab Spring, a series of anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy revolts in the Arab world, started innocuously in Tunisia. Mohamed Bouazizi, a peasant from Sidi Bouzid, had become distraught over apparent official high-handedness and corruption amid stultifying poverty and in protest publicly committed suicide. That action was the cue that long suffering Tunisians needed to be rid of the long-standing dictator, Zein al-Abedine Ben Ali. The success of the revolution in Tunisia

Despite so many efforts to make internationally designed peacebuilding and development projects sustainable after the outsiders have left, international NGOs and donors still struggle to realize the goal of “local ownership” in practice. Now, a new approach called “local first,” led by the UK-based organization Peace Direct, aims to go beyond efforts to merely transfer ownership of a program to a local organization—it seeks to put local people in the lead. Carolyn Hayman, chi

For over four decades, the Republic of Guinea, the first country in Francophone Africa to gain independence and the world’s second largest supplier of bauxite, an aluminum ore, was ruled by authoritarian strongmen. To a large extent, the initial recourse to authoritarianism was a response to the immense challenges that Guinea’s first President, Ahmed Sekou Toure, faced when he hastily proclaimed independence in 1958, angering the French government. To deal with the hostile