Saturday 17 September 2016

Eritrea: 15 years later still no information on jailed senior politicians and independent journalists

     


GENEVA (16 September 2016) – The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Sheila B. Keetharuth, today called on the Eritrean Government to urgently provide information on the whereabouts and state of health of senior government officials and independent journalists arrested on 18 September 2001 and in the following days.
Fifteen years ago, the Eritrean authorities arrested and detained a group of senior cabinet ministers, members of parliament and independent journalists without charge or trial. To date, the Government has refused to share any information on their whereabouts and state of health.
“The Eritrean Government has denied those arrested their fundamental right to liberty and security of the person, right not to be subjected to torture, right to a fair trial as well as right to freedom of expression and opinion,” Ms. Keetharuth said ahead of the anniversary on Sunday. “Those arrested have been detained incommunicado and in solitary confinement. Even family members have never been allowed to have any contact whatsoever with them.” 
“The 2001 clampdown set in motion a chain of egregious, widespread and systematic human rights violations that continues to this very day, including arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, denial of the right to a fair trial within a reasonable time, right not to be subjected to torture, and disappearances, among others,” the Special Rapporteur said. “In addition, the right to freedom of opinion and expression as well the right to freedom of the press has since then, also been negatively impacted.” readmore

South Sudan’s Slide into Conflict: Revisiting the Past and Reassessing Partnerships

Summary
South Sudan’s return to violence in December 2013 poses questions about the quality of
partnership between donors and fragile and conflict-affected states more broadly. The quality
of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the thinness of donor appetite for risk
combined to highlight the fatal flaws in the nascent South Sudan’s foundations.
The conflict caught donors and many long-term observers of South Sudan unawares, and has
led to a suspension of much development programming, in favour of humanitarian assistance
to alleviate the effects of the violence.
There is an urgent need to return to development activity based on a new political partnership
between the international community and South Sudan, one that seeks to address – rather than
work around – the real obstacles to the realization of a peaceful, stable and democratic South Sudan.
In the future, donors will need to be much better at integrating their development and political
activity; be able to manage a higher degree of political risk; avoid the temptation to work only
on the ‘demand side’; and learn how to work with the political/security as well as the technical
dimensions of the current context  read more

Friday 16 September 2016

Evolutionary Origins of Leadership and Followership

Drawing upon evolutionary logic, leadership is reconceptualized in terms of the out
-
come of strategic interactions among individuals who are following different, yet
complementary decision rules to solve recurrent coordination problems. This article
uses the vast psychological literature on leadership as a database to test several evo
lutionary hypotheses about the origins of leadership and followership in humans. As
expected, leadership correlates with initiative taking, trait measures of intelligence,
specific task competencies, and several indicators of generosity. The review finds no
link between leadership and dominance. The evolutionary analysis accounts for reliableage,
health, and sex differences in leadership emergence. In general,
evolutionary theory provides a useful, integrative framework for studying
leader-follower relationships and generates various novel research hypothese  readmore

When Leaders Protect Their Power


To help their group achieve its goals, leaders are often endowed
with power. Power—operationally defined in terms of asymmetric
control over group resources—affords the capacity to influence
others by providing or withholding resources and administering
punishments some leaders display a tremendous taste for power and are more concerned with preserving their own power than with fos-tering their group’s goals (Maner & Mead, 2010 readmore

The essential tension between leadership and power

Leaders, however, are typically endowed with power, and power can corrupt (Kipnis, 1972). Power is operationally defined as having control over resources, which affords the ability to influence others by bestowing or withholding those resources (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Instead of wielding their power for the greater good, some leaders may be tempted to use their power in self-serving ways. Although groups often need leaders to achieve important goals, providing leaders with power can make followers susceptible to exploitation.

The recent scientific literature has identified a variety of ways in which power can lead to negative behaviors. Power causes people to become disinhibited, increasing the likelihood that they will act on their (sometimes selfish) impulses, rather than thinking carefully about what is best for the group (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Power can cause people to objectify others and to see them as a means to their own ends (Gruenfeld et al., 2008). Powerful people tend to be bad at taking the perspective of others (Galinsky et al., 2006) and, at the same time, they are good at satisfying their own needs and goals (Slabu & Guinote, 2010). Power also heightens sexual goals, which can set the stage for inappropriate advances toward colleagues and subordinates (Kunstman & Maner, 2011). With all of these transformative effects of power, it perhaps comes as no surprise that many leaders seem to behave in apparently corrupt ways.  read more

Migration in Ethiopia: History, Current Trends and Future Prospects

Introduction
It is estimated that in 2010, 10.2 percent of global migrants will hail from Africa (UNDP, 2009). Only three
percent of the world migrates, and around 1.9 percent of Africa‟s population engages in international
migration (UNDP, 2009). This is not surprising, however, as it is well documented in migration studies that
the “poorest of the poor” do not migrate, and Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region in the world.
Migration flows from Sub-Saharan Africa are thus occurring within a context of extreme poverty, conflict,
and the HIV/AIDs pandemic, all of which impact migration dynamics (Adepoju, 2008).
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world and in 2005 had an emigration rate of 0.6
percent, which is low in comparison to Africa as a whole. Ethiopia faces complex challenges of food
insecurity, overpopulation, drought, political instability, and ethnic conflict. In addition to these issues,
Ethiopia faces large challenges with respect to migration flows.
From the 1980s onward, the Horn of Africa, which consists of Eritrea, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia,
and Ethiopia, became the largest refugee-producing area in the world, with Ethiopia being the largest
contributor to the refugee flows (Bariagaber, 1999). As a consequence, Ethiopia became internationally
known for its refugee crisis, including problems of managing refugee flows and the issue of repatriation.
Today the number of Ethiopians seeking refuge in other countries has drastically decreased.
Political instability in the 1970s and the large refugee flows of the 1980s led to the development
of the Ethiopian Diaspora, which today is actively engaged in political and development processes in
Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Diaspora is one of the largest of all African countries and is concentrated
primarily in the United States and United Kingdom. Remittances to Ethiopia from the Diaspora provide
an integral source of income for families to sustain themselves through external shocks and meet their
basic needs.
Internal migration flows in Ethiopia are currently larger than external flows, but the exact number
of people who migrate internally is not known. Internal migration occurs in the form of rural-urban
migration, rural-rural migration, and resettlement policies, which are all substantial in Ethiopia. Internal
migration in Ethiopia has traditionally occurred at marriage when the wife moves to live in the husband‟s
community. In addition to this traditional internal mobility, urbanization in Ethiopia is a growing trend that
puts pressure on urban infrastructure and resources (De Waal, 1991: Ezra & Kiros, 2001).
The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of migration and development in Ethiopia.
This will be achieved through a discussion of historical and contemporary migration patters (Section 3 and
4), the Ethiopian Diaspora (Section 5), the development impacts of migration in Ethiopia (Section 6),
migration policies in Ethiopia (Section 7), an exploration of the migration relationship between the
Netherlands and Ethiopia (Section 8), and a conclusion that examines potential future migration flows in

Ethiopia (Section 9) read more

Thursday 15 September 2016

IN MEMORY OF PRISONERS EXECUTED BY THE EPLF ( 1970s & 1980s)

In the late 1960s Eritrea was among the main sources of students for the university in Ethiopia. This was the case despite the fact that the Ethiopian government introduced a calibration of the university entrance examination scores according to the province of origin, in order to restrict the entry of Eritrean students. Erlich (1983) who was lecturer at the University of Addis Ababa also observed that the proportion of Eritreans at University was higher than for Ethiopians in the early 1970s. 
readmore