In the light of the recent attack at Bamako’s Radisson Blu Hotel, Cameron Duodu looks at the context of Malian political instability, and how French involvement needs to be re-strategized if it is to have a positive impact.

Despite a long list of abuses by Canadian mining companies in Africa - and elsewhere - it’s very difficult to hold them accountable at home. Will the new government of Justin Trudeau defy the powerful mining industry and adopt legislation to constrain their abuses abroad?

The horrendous terrorist attacks in the French capital last week brought the whole world to a stand-still. Yet similar violence elsewhere has not attracted comparable outrage and sympathy. What’s more, the daily deaths of impoverished people condemned to a sub-human existence by White supremacist ideologies hardly make the news.

Universal Children’s Day was marked on Friday, 20 November. In September this year, the UN included a target to end violence against children in the Sustainable Development Goals, explicitly linking, for the first time, a violence-free society for children to economic growth.

If France is “at war”, as President Hollande announced after the horrific attacks in Paris last week, then it is an unjust war between reactionary forces equally disdainful of human life, neither of them less deliberately and consciously cruel in the pursuit of reactionary political objectives. Supporting either France or the Islamists will only worsen the dynamic between two unacceptable alternatives.