In one of Africa's most celebrated surprises this year, Nigerian voters unseated President Goodluck Jonathan. The election of Muhammadu Buhari defied expectations of electoral fraud and violence, and his anticorruption platform sparked hopes for reform and economic growth. Yet progress on both fronts has been slow and uneven. To understand why, pick up Tom Burgis's "The Looting Machine," a bracing look at why a continent blessed with one-third of the world's hydrocarbon and mineral wealth remains mired in poverty and dysfunction. A former Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, Burgis goes beyond the tales of spectacular venality among Africa's "Big Men" --…

We’ve known for a while that black Americans aren’t making economic progress. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, shows that the black-white wage gap is now the widest it has been since 1979. What's more interesting, though, is how inequality has been increasing, and for whom. It used to be that low-skilled black workers suffered the greatest disadvantage relative to their white counterparts. But there has been a strange reversal in the past 40 years. EPI finds that the black-white wage gap has become wider — and is widening faster — among those with more education. This chart illustrates the history of the wage gap among men with less than 10…

TEHRAN — The 26 drone-building teams descended on the polished, manicured technology park 15 miles east of Tehran with the overflowing enthusiasm of school kids preparing for the Science Olympiad. Their challenge, in a competition sponsored by the fast-growing Digikala company, Iran’s version of Amazon, was to create the best drone for delivering packages. For the drone builders, the prize that day at Pardis Technology Park, Iran’s purpose-built version of Silicon Valley, was 50 million tomans, or about $14,300. But for Iran, the goal was much greater: a step toward providing the country’s whiz-kid youth with the hope that they have a…

Uzbekistan (US i/ʊzˈbɛkᵻˌstæn, -ˌstɑːn/, UK /ʊzˌbɛkᵻˈstɑːn, ʌz-, -ˈstæn/), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan(Uzbek: Oʻzbekiston Respublikasi, Ўзбекистон Республикаси), is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia. It is a unitary, constitutional, presidential republic, comprising twelve provinces, one autonomous republic and a capital city. Uzbekistan is bordered by five countries, Kazakhstan to the north; Tajikistan to the southeast; Kyrgyzstan to the northeast; Afghanistan to the south; and Turkmenistan to the southwest. Once part of the Turkic Khaganate and later Timurid Empires, the region that today includes the Republic of Uzbekistan was conquered in the early 16th century by Eastern Turkic-speaking nomads. The area was gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 19th century, and in 1924 what is now Uzbekistan became a bordered constituent republic of the Soviet Union, known…

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is an expansion of the 1993 Foreign Affairs article written by Samuel Huntington that hypothesized a new post-Cold War world order. Prior to the end of the Cold War, societies were divided by ideological differences, such as the struggle between democracy and communism. Huntington's main thesis argues, "The most important distinctions among peoples are [no longer] ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural" (21). New patterns of conflict will occur along the boundaries of different cultures and patterns of cohesion will be found within the cultural boundaries. Part One: A World of Civilizations To…