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The aim of this article is designed to provide an overview of the historical and contemporary relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as to examine the recent geopolitical situation and the perception of local people in Ethiopia. This paper is mainly based on secondary data analysis of the available secondary information and news reports, online articles, academic literature, interviews and discussions. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea brought political, economic and social security threats to the Horn of Africa. Although the economy in Ethiopia is at the developing stage, recent protests have shaken the country to its core. Since 2015, anti-government protests have been triggered over freedom of the press, land rights, underrepresented seats in the coalition parties, and horizontal inequality in economic, political and social affairs among ethnic groups across the country. In this study, it is established that the unrestrained political circumstance of the current regime has created dissension and violence among the public, and thus led to escalating political, economic and security crises in the country. If this issue is not rectified quickly, the peace in the country may be jeopardised. Another issue is that although Ethiopia-Eritrea rapprochement is appreciated, the agreement between the two leaders and their foreign policy orientation is still unclear.

As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and "more-than-wicked" in nature, educators and educational policy makers emphasize the importance of deepening knowledge about the causes of these problems, creating policies to address them more efficiently, and offering more compelling moral arguments that might persuade people to change their convictions, and-as a consequence-their behaviour. These concerns shape how policies on the study of interculturality are approached in contemporary teacher education in our contexts in Canada and the UK. Our research, however, positions these as problems that cannot be solved with improved information, enhanced cross-cultural skills, or moral claims, because they are rooted in modernity's systems, which structure the possibilities for coexistence on the planet. We see these problems as ontological challenges of being that emerge from a modernist ontology rooted in colonial violences. Our approach therefore explores an orientation to intercultural education which enables student teachers to expand their understanding of cultural and ecological relationships beyond existing frameworks of mod-ernist knowledge, politics, and economic systems. In this paper, we share some of our current learning about the affordances and limitations of dominant approaches to intercultural education, and then explore how the method of "social cartography" can enable engagement with ontological problems in teacher education in a way that generates possibilities for imagining decolonial learning futures, beyond modernity.

The 2015 presidential elections in Nigeria were unique in many facets. Apart from being the first time an incumbent candidate of a ruling party lost to the candidate of the opposition party, it was also the first presidential election that did not go through expensive and rigorous post-election litigations processes. From the political marketing point of view, we argued that the marketoriented approach, the purposeful, coordinated, and strategic use of marketing communication media and tools contributed to the success of APC at the 2015 presidential polls. The success story of the 2015 election gave rise to the evolution of voter-centric election campaigns, indicating that marketing and communication professionals and strategies, rather than violence and electoral fraud, have dominated and could dictate the outcomes of future elections in Nigeria. Based on the foregoing, this study reviewed the 2019 presidential election (the next election after the 2015 general election in Nigeria) to ascertain if that anticipated better tomorrow is here. We rely on experts' interviews, direct observations, and secondary materials to confirm if the political landscape in Nigeria is market-driven. Findings revealed that the 2019 presidential election was extremely monetised, violent, and fraught with all manners of electoral misconducts such that are antithetical to the principles and practice of political marketing. We aver that electioneering in Nigeria is not market-driven and voter-centric.

In this paper, we try to examine the mistreatment, enslavement, forced labor, violence, and persecution meted out against Indian migrant laborers in Saudi Arabia. We also attempt to explain the Kafala, system of sponsorship, its mechanism, and how migrant laborers like the protagonist of Benyamin's Goat Days, Najeeb Muhammad, become victims to such system. This study sheds light not only on Najeeb's dehumanizing confinement, fear, mental agony, and physical torture but also on his resistance and rebellion against his own enslavement. It concludes that the story of Najeeb underscores the pressing need for the government of Saudi Arabia to reform the Kafala sponsorship system to prevent the exploitation of vulnerable migrant laborers and to ensure decent, safe working and living conditions for them. These reforms should be enforced by monitoring sponsors who would ensure that violators are persecuted. It is also an obligation shared by the migrant laborers' sending countries which should create awareness among migrant laborers about the working conditions laws, benefits and rights expected in the Gulf States to avoid persecution and slavery like Najeeb. This study concludes that Najeeb's narrative of slavery in Saudi Arabia harms its image and holy status as an enlightening minaret of Islam and its loving and peaceful religious teachings that do not permit slavery, oppression, exploitation and humiliation.

Climatic catastrophes affect living conditions and especially the agricultural sector. There is recognition that weather is one the main drivers of food insecurity in Kenya. Nations that are politically stable tend to enhance accountability and prepare so that they can respond appropriately to climatic catastrophes. Declining food production when the demand is high will cause deficits which in turn will lead to inflation and high food prices. The gap between demand and maize production has put maize at the center of the food security debate in Kenya. Maize is the most important cereal contributing greatly to food security. The last three Kenyan general elections (2007, 2013, 2017) sparked violence which greatly impacted on the food security of the nation. As a result, many Kenyans were left food insecure, leading to unnecessary deaths caused by hunger and malnutrition. The government represents pillars of change within the food security of the nation and improved agriculture and food security is applauded by citizens. When governance is poor, there may be a hindrance by complex political debates and, if approved, inadequate investments may be made within the agriculture sector. The objective of this study was to assess drought, governance, politics, and food stability within Kenya before and after elections. ; M-DS

In Latin America, rural indigenous communities are one of the most vulnerable groups. In recent years, public and private initiatives worldwide have been focusing on indigenous entrepreneurship as a way to tackle poverty. Since In 2014, the Chilean government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) started a program calledthe Indigenous Development Program (PDFI). As a researcher and consultant involved in the programme, I… had access toThis wasI was immersed into a complex network of power, incentives and knowledge struggles within among a wide variety of social actors involved in the context of this programme, ( different including: government and international agencies;, international agency, leaders and members of indigenous communities;, other indigenous communities, universitiesacademics,; and "experts" ). This complex network posed many ethical questions that not only exceeded our control as a group, but also enforced ethical boundaries of Western "development projects". As such, theis article will reflexive reflect on and critically engage with issues around positionality, power/knowledge, coloniality and key assumptions that surrounded our experience in Chile. It aims to show and unravel liminal spaces about ethical issues, as well as complex constraints for ethical development within communities exposed to extreme poverty, exclusion and violence. Finally, I account discuss several challenges for further research and work with communities in these contexts.

Recent scholarship in modern Chinese studies has established the centrality of the figure of the child in modern configurations of nationhood. Yet very few studies have focused on the motif of child martyrdom and its place within Chinese socialist culture. By exploring the cultural afterlife of the socialist martyr Wang Erxiao in mid-twentieth-century China, this article shows how the heroic sacrificial death of the boy both powered and imperiled the Communist-led revolution and the construction of a new, socialist society. The author argues that, on the one hand, the figure of the socialist child martyr embodied the desire for the child to play a more active role in the Communist revolution and in the creation of a socialist utopia. On the other hand, in lionizing the heroic death of the child—the so-called revolutionary successor—stories like Wang Erxiao's also posed an existential threat to the socialist community and brought to the fore tensions intrinsic to politicizing and aestheticizing the death of a child. By examining the relationship between children, violence, and sacrificial death, this article highlights the desires and anxieties embedded within the socialist project to create an image of the "new child." Keywords: child martyrdom, Wang Erxiao, War of Resistance against Japan, socialist literature, Boy Scouts, Alain Badiou

Several studies have analysed the way presidential/political speeches are deployed to capture the ideologies of the speech maker. Many as these studies are, scholars have not attempted a critical discourse analysis of the State of Emergency speech declared by former Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo, in May 2004. This study examines the State of Emergency speech with a view to examining the way various linguistic categories are deployed to achieve different functions in the speech. The study deploys Norman Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis as theoretical framework. This model is adopted because it provides a platform for the description, interpretation and explanation of text and talk. The data is sourced through the purposive sampling method. This is because the speech is considered as one of those in which Obasanjo's power consciousness, through his linguistic choices, is enunciated. The study revealed that Obasanjo used nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, collocations and assertions to achieve three main purposes in the text: to justify his decision to declare a state of emergency in Plateau State, to castigate purported culprits and to delegitimise, unequivocally, violence/terrorism. The study reveals that Obasanjo uses language to underscore the need to chart a new course for good governance in the war-torn Pateau State.

ABSTRACTThis research will examine USAID's democracy assistance for Timor Leste's economic growth. The background of this research was Timor Leste's failure as well as many challenges faced in order to create political stability after having received USAID's democracy assistance. Hence, the research question from this background would be "why USAID's democracy assistance provided through the Election and Processes framework has not been seen effective to bring positive impacts for Timor Leste's economic growth?". This question is analysed by using the foreign aid effectiveness framework, the assumption of democracy and economic growth connectivity and the assumption of political stability and economic growth connectivity. The conclusion of this analysis is that USAID's democracy assistance provided to Timor Leste has not effectively support Timor Leste's economic growth since there are some aid effectiveness characteristics that does not correspond with the characteristic and ability of the people Timor Leste. The disrepancy slows down the process of acceptance of democracy that led to the slow pace of individual understanding of the importance of political process. The slow process led to some cases of political conflict and violence in Timor Leste, disrupting political stability in Timor Leste, which ultimately risen the challenges to Timor Leste's economic growth.Keywords: democracy assistance, foreign aid effectiveness, democracy, political stability, economic growth.

International audience ; Contours du jour qui vient met en scène un personnage quadruplement vulnérable : Musango est une enfant, de sexe féminin, atteinte d'une maladie incurable et évoluant dans une société marquée par la situation postcoloniale. Il s'agira de montrer que Musango passe d'une vulnérabilité passive à une « vulnérabilité habilitante » (Judith Butler, Le pouvoir des mots : politique du performatif, trad. Charlotte Nordmann, Paris, Éd. Amsterdam, 2004 [1997] p. 22.), et qu'elle devient ainsi l'allégorie de la vision de Léonora Miano de l'avenir de l'Afrique subsaharienne. La vulnérabilité de Musango est avant tout une vulnérabilité linguistique, construite par les interpellations injurieuses qu'elle reçoit de sa mère. Jetée sur les routes par cette dernière, elle rencontre deux femmes, Kwin et la vieille Musango, qui est peut-être une projection imaginaire de la fillette. Ces deux personnages ont su transformer leur vulnérabilité linguistique en vulnérabilité habilitante, et sont des figures de résilience qui inspirent Musango. La fiction, qui raconte ici la façon dont Musango sort de sa passivité à l'égard de la violence de sa mère en s'appuyant sur sa vulnérabilité, serait donc aussi le moyen de ré-élaborer les rapports de vulnérabilité entre ex-colonisés et ex-colonisateurs, afin de redonner aux premiers leurs moyens d'agir. mots clés : vulnérabilité linguistique, vulnérabilité habilitante, care, postcolonie

In this article, I enquire into the historical circumstances (past and present) under which vulnerability, an embodied and social condition of openness to violence, turns into victimhood, an act of affective communication that attaches the moral value accrued to the vulnerable to everyone who claims it. The 20th-century victimhood, I argue, emerged as a master-signifier of emotional capitalism through the two grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis and human rights, each of which tactically mobilizes affective claims to trauma or injury to bestow the moral value of the sufferer to any powerful claimant independent of the position of vulnerability they speak from. Turning to the 21st century, I place victimhood within the communicative context of post-recession and digital neoliberalism to show how the two amplify, accelerate and complicate the circulation of affective claims to suffering, rendering platformized pain a 'new normal' of our culture. In order to address the implications of this 'new normal' on the most vulnerable in society, I propose the distinction between 'tactical' and 'systemic' vulnerability as a heuristic frame that enables us to ask questions about who claims to be a victim, from which position and to which effects; and, in so doing, helps us to scrutinize the social contexts in which affective claims to victimhood are made and the power relations such claims reproduce or challenge.

Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as 'representational force' and 'physical force' respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.

The Scheduled Castes/"Dalits" represent the "untouchables" in India's constitutional framework and are traditionally outside the four-tiered rung of the Hindu religion. The notion of "superiority, pollution and separateness" is ingrained in the stratification of caste and the victim complex is subsumed in the unwritten public code. Despite the safeguards in the constitution and affirmative legislation they still suffer from institutional discrimination and structural violence inherent in the caste system. It takes the form of hierarchy which is an intrinsic part of the Hindu faith and the Dalits are employed in occupations such as human scavenging. The prevalence of caste discrimination in the rural areas of India makes for any affirmative legislation to be ineffective for the majority of the population. The issue has been magnified in recent times by the ascension of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power which has retrenched Hindutva, with the consequence that Dalits who convert from Hinduism to Islam or Christianity have to forfeit access to welfare benefits. This paper analyses the cause of the institutional discrimination that criminalizes the Dalit communities and the lack of impact of the legal protections afforded to them. It will argue that the victimization of the "untouchables" will continue because of the rigid caste structure, lack of enforcement of legal protection in villages, economic privilege and the resort to ideology of the current government.

Since the 1990s several Latin American countries have entered a phase defined as "post-conflict". This concept has quickly ceased to indicate a new beginning to become a common place underlining a governmentality model in continuity with the past, or a synonym for neoliberalism. In this paper we analyse the case of Guatemala. We propose that the ethics of compassion, based on the ideas of Human Rights and ethnic identity, although allowing the end of the war and the envision peace, it shapes a post-conflict order that perpetuates inequality, favours social violence (emblematically represented by the mara phenomenon) and criminalizes poverty. ; Desde los Años Noventa varios países latinoamericanos han entrado en una fase definida "posconflicto". Este concepto ha dejado rápidamente de indicar un nuevo inicio para convertirse en un lugar común que subraya un modelo de gubernamentalizad en continuidad con el pasado, que a su vez se usa como sinónimo de neoliberal. Ahondamos aquí el caso de Guatemala, planteando que la ética de la compasión, fundamentada en las ideas de Derechos Humanos e identidad étnica, si bien permite terminar la guerra y augurar la paz, configura un orden posconflicto que perpetúa la desigualdad, favorece la violencia social (emblemáticamente representada por el fenómeno de las maras) y criminaliza la pobreza.

In this casuistry, two accidents from Germany and Switzerland are presented that happened during the shot of recoilless anti-tank weapons. In both cases, the injuries led to the death of two soldiers: A 22-year-old soldier in Germany was struck by the counter mass of a so-called Davis gun which had been fired by a comrade during a firing exercise; he died from his severe injuries, especially in the abdominal part of the body. As a peculiarity of the wound morphology, it was found to be a thick-layered, metallic, gray material in the wound cavity, which corresponded to the material of the counter mass that was ejected opposite to the shooting direction. The other case took place in Switzerland, where a 24-year-old soldier was seriously injured during an exercise with portable anti-tank rockets. At the time the shot was fired, he stood behind the launcher and was hit by the propulsion jet of the rocket motor. He died as well from his severe injuries, which were located at the chest done by the gas jet and by the very high pressure. In both cases, two different causes of death were present: massive blunt violence in the first case versus a jet of hot gases of very high speed and temperature in the second case.