Africa: Update From Editor On Future Plans read full article at worldnews365.me

AfricaFocus January 24, 2023 African News Leave a comment 12 Views










When President Barack Obama hosted his US-Africa Summit in August 2014, my roundups in AfricaFocus Bulletin featured critical analysis of the likely outcome and the issues that were likely to be ignored, in addition to alternate viewpoints by civil society groups.

I doubt that such detailed critiques of the Biden summit final November are significantly helpful. Most AfricaFocus readers will already be very conscious of the doubtful worth of summits that prioritize photo-ops and guarantees over conferences which have real-world outcomes. Within the present political setting in Washington, it’s clear that presidential guarantees are largely nugatory. They’re most frequently doomed upfront by the low chance of congressional approval or bureaucratic follow-up.

[For those who want to check it out themselves, I did compile a spreadsheet of some of the coverage of the event.]

Mainstream U.S. priorities are higher measured by extra substantive indicators, for instance, the allocation of consideration of mainstream media or of precise cash dispersed regardless of congressional or bureaucratic obstacles.

In protection by mainstream Western media, white Ukrainian lives in sensible phrases matter numerous occasions extra to U.S. opinion leaders than lives in Africa and the Center East. And the budgets spent on increasing the already overwhelming U.S. navy footprint in each nook of the globe reveal that geopolitical rivalries and navy contractors trump public items both home or worldwide, a lot much less these most wanted by Africans in Africa or within the diaspora.

Much more vital than the marginalization of Africa-specific wants is the failure to concentrate to spokespersons from the World South who’ve taken the lead in addressing at this time’s international points. Visionary voices equivalent to that of Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados discover little or no echo within the corridors of official Washington.

In AfricaFocus Bulletin over the past three years, I’ve given main consideration to such international points and the way they’re framed, whereas giving a lot much less protection to information or evaluation of particular African international locations. And I’ve printed the Bulletin much less often and given increased precedence to editing and writing for other projects and media outlets.

One cause, in fact, is just age and the truth that I’ve now been publishing this Bulletin (or one among its predecessors) since 1995. In 2023, I plan to proceed to share occasional notes highlighting hyperlinks that I feel may be of curiosity to subscribers. I anticipate that the majority notes shall be a lot shorter than this one, however not as brief as social media posts on Twitter or Fb. And as an alternative of together with excerpts, I’ll hyperlink to materials made obtainable on Google drive.

For the primary quarter of 2023, I’ll proceed sending these out by e-mail utilizing Mailchimp, in addition to archiving them on the net. However I will even be exploring a transition to creating Substack my main hub for sharing ideas or hyperlinks with AfricaFocus readers. I observe fairly a number of blogs on-line, and I discover that increasingly more of the authors I most respect (Cathy Sunshine, for the standard of her writing, and Branko Milanovic, for the vary of his insights on international points) host their blogs there. Tomas Pueyo, one other writer on Substack, explains why it’s more author-friendly than other platforms.

As a pattern of 1 form of content material that I shall be sharing, you could find two articles from the January 14 subject of The Continent highlighting the historical significance of the small country of Barbados, to pair with the AfricaFocus from November on the current global leadership of Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

William Minter, Editor, AfricaFocus

P. S. Along with AfricaFocus, I plan to dedicate a lot of my time to making ready my analysis information to contribute to the John Hope Franklin Analysis Middle at Duke College and to the Moorland-Spingarn Analysis Middle at Howard College, in addition to to make sure that related books that I personal are digitized to share entry with analysis libraries in Mozambique, Angola, and different international locations. My time to do that is free, however I welcome donations (as of no longer but tax-deductible) for different bills to make that potential. These may be made most conveniently by way of the AfricaFocus Paypal link or by way of a Zelle cost to [email protected].