Lansana Gberie

Debates on reforming the United Nations almost always focus on the Security Council, whose permanent membership, it is generally agreed, no longer reflects global geopolitical realities, and should therefore be expanded to include more representation, including from Africa and Latin America.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will end her final term in office as Liberia’s – and Africa’s first elected woman – President in January next year. She will be 79. If she manages an orderly transition, she would have capped an extraordinarily successful political journey.

UNGASS 2016, a three-day meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in April, is the most anticipated in the history of international drug control regimes, mostly because it is has attracted intense civil society interest.

An important report by the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) in June 2014, ‘Not Just for Transit: Drugs, the State and Society in West Africa’, emphasized decriminalizing some degree of narcotic drug use and possession for personal use, while calling for drug traffickers and their accomplice

The loss of Professor Stephen Ellis on 29 July 2015 at 62, after a battle with the debilitating leukemia which he bore with stoicism and good humour, was to me a personal one. He was a great friend and a mentor.

Towards the end of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the final volume completed in 1776) Edward Gibbon pauses to reflect on how by the 15th century the Greeks – the creators of modern civilization – began to take serious notice of the newer nations of northern Europe, which th

The publishers claim for Africa and the War on Drugs that it is a vital book on a neglected subject.

Peter Penfold was UK’s High Commissioner to Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2000 when his services were terminated after disagreement with Tony Blair’s New Labour government over Sierra Leone – over the so-called ‘Arms to Africa’ scandal of 1998.

On 16 May, convicted war criminal, Charles Taylor, delivered a 30-minute speech – part plea for clemency, part lubricious defence of his actions, and part grandstanding – before his trial judges at The Hague as he awaits sentencing on 30 May.

I have been asked by many people about my views on the conviction, on 26 April, of Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president, for aiding and abetting Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF).