Politics

Against the backdrop of historical great power competition, Africa can today create a tremendous impact on the global arena. While China is currently gaining foothold on the continent with its increased investments, infrastructure projects and trade, also Russia has an interest in maintaining good relationships with African states, leaving the EU and the U.S. struggling for their space in the equation. In the end, a Cold War-like rivalry over Africa between the West and the China-Russia strategic alliance could ensue.

30 years ago, federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives serving search and arrest warrants for a fundamentalist Christian cult known as the Branch Davidians became involved in a firefight which developed into a nearly two-month-long siege with the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the helm. The changing of the conservative movement in the U.S. into one largely dominated and controlled by extremist parties who do not have an interest in making medially or statistically informed policy, but rather in appealing to their own base and ideology, remains the legacy of the siege until today.

The American slave trade remains one of the most horrific periods of American history. Many in the United States classify the Atlantic Slave Trade, the American slavery system, and the Jim Crow laws as reprehensible acts, crimes committed by White Americans and English, and a stain upon the United States, and rightly so. However, these events should also be classified as genocide as they meet the legal criteria for such crimes and also follow a very similar line when looking at other, more internationally recognized forms of genocide.