Foreign Policy

Even on their best days, the world’s failed states are difficult to mistake for anything but tragic examples of countries gone wrong. A few routinely make the headlines -- Somalia, Iraq, Congo. But alongside their brand of extreme state dysfunction exists an entirely separate, easily missed class of states teetering on the edge. In dozens of countries, corrupt or feeble governments are proving themselves dangerously incapable of carrying out the most basic responsibilities of statehood. These countries -- nations such… more

What if Qaddafi proclaimed that President Bush is right? The Middle East needs more democracy. And Libya should work with Europe and America to promote human rights. Or what if Mubarak, in a secret visit to the White House, defended crackdowns on Egypt’s dissidents to a crowd that included George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Hadley? Qaddafi and Mubarak did just that -- that is, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi and Gamal Mubarak, the sons groomed to follow in… more

Christina is a modern, multitasking, American 15-year-old -- fiddling with her new iPod, sassing the tall boy slouched beside her, and getting an impromptu lesson in Filipino culture at an after-school program in Oakland, California. "I speak Tagalog and Filipino," says the group's counselor, Michelle Ferrer, "two languages from the island where my family comes from." Christina is puzzled. "The Philippines is an island?" she asks skeptically. Ferrer nods and Christina frowns. "I thought it was in China," she says.… more

"If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance." So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131 B.C. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must… more

Evil has a reputation for resilience. And rightly so. Banishing it from Middle Earth alone took three very long Lord of the Rings movies. But equally deserving of this reputation is the concept of evil -- in particular, a conception of evil that was on display in those very movies: the idea that behind all the world's bad deeds lies a single, dark, cosmic force. No matter how many theologians reject this idea, no matter how incompatible it seems with… more

In most African elections, Big Men use coercion and bribes to stay in office. But since 2000, three major African nations have held real democratic presidential referendums. Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade ousted Abdou Diouf in March 2000. John Kufuor defeated Jerry Rawlings' party in Ghana nine months later. And in December 2002, Kenya's Mwai Kibaki triumphed over Daniel Arap Moi's handpicked successor. All three of these opposition leaders are elderly statesmen. Wade was 74 when he was elected, Kufuor was 63,… more

When an anonymous Californian posted a MiG-21 fighter jet for sale on www.ebay.com last November, the prospect of the plane falling into terrorist hands apparently didn't rankle U.S. authorities too much. After all, a foreign buyer would need a hard-to-obtain export license to cart the prize away.

But the MiG's sale did stir unease over the wild and wooly nature of online auctions, which increasingly feature illicit goods like stolen car parts, unregistered firearms, and purloined antiquities. EBay alone adds… more

Mobolaji Aluko, a Nigerian who chairs the department of chemical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has a devil of a time convincing Americans to invest in his entrepreneurial business ventures back home. Nigeria's political and social instability don't help. But equally important, says Aluko, are the endless e-mail scams originating from Nigeria that are "always at the back of [investors'] minds."

Termed "advance fee fraud," or "419s" after a section in the Nigerian penal code, these e-mail cons… more

Last year, Irish President Mary McAleese approved a law that makes trespassing a criminal, not civil, offense. The law's unspoken target: Ireland's 25,000 Travellers, nomadic people known derisively as "tinkers" or "white gypsies." Travellers typically live in ad-hoc trailer camps, pulling up stakes whenever seasonal work is available elsewhere. The criminal trespass law--the first in Europe--makes Travellers subject to arrest for erecting unauthorized camps.

But unlike past attempts to curb Travellers, the new law was not accepted quietly. Within hours… more

Ongoing conflict in the Middle East forced the postponement of the celebratory grand opening of Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt -- a revival of the country's famed library -- planned for last April.

But the recent fighting didn't slow the library's headfirst foray into cyberspace. In April, Bibliotheca began offering the public access to over 100 trillion bytes of data via its Web site (www.bibalex.org)-including snapshots of 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. The digital collection, stored on… more