This is Zimbabwe

Posted on 11/4/2007 by Curzon

One of the newer entries to the “Regional Specialists” category of our blogroll is This is Zimbabwe, a blog by Sokwanele, a democratic civic movement in Zimbabwe. Their daily posts are real and dirty glimpses as to how life is in a country where the most recent monthly inflation figures were over 25,000%. Check it out!

About Curzon

Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (1859 - 1925) entered the British House of Commons as a Conservative MP in 1886, where he served as undersecretary of India and Foreign Affairs. He was appointed Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th century where he delineated the North West Frontier Province, ordered a military expedition to Tibet, and unsuccessfully tried to partition the province of Bengal during his six-year tenure. Curzon served as Leader of the House of Lords in Prime Minister Lloyd George's War Cabinet and became Foreign Secretary in January 1919, where his most famous act was the drawing of the Curzon Line between a new Polish state and Russia. His publications include Russia in Central Asia (1889) and Persia and the Persian Question (1892). In real life, "Curzon" is a US citizen from the East Coast who has been a financial analyst, freelance translator, and university professor; he is currently on assignment in Tokyo.
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3 Responses to This is Zimbabwe

  1. IJ says:
    11/4/2007 at 12:26 pm

    Zimbabwe: 1 000 More Tractors Expected From China

    Writing a global rule-set for intervention won’t be easy. The insurance risks map suggests that a militarised insurance company and the United Nations would intervene in regions for different reasons. For example the insurance company would not intervene to stop a humanitarian disaster. From: Mapping the Gap.

  2. Pingback: This is Zimbabwe at Forward Deployed

  3. IJ says:
    11/6/2007 at 11:38 am

    Update

    Intervention is just one of the subjects covered recently by the immensely provocative TPM Barnett.

    He thinks that China has got intervention mostly right and the US has it wrong.

    the best nation-building brand out there right now is the Chinese model. I know, I know, it doesn’t meet our threshold definitions of democracy and human rights (not to mention coming nowhere near our EPA standards), but it sure as hell beats America’s post-Cold War product line of Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s be honest: China’s leveraged buyouts, as mercantilist as they are, beat our hostile takeovers—hands down. And that just tells you how bad America’s military intervention “brand” has become. So, starting with Vietnam. . .

    Put another way, you can invade the country and then start up your counter-insurgency/reconstruction ops (the American route), or you might just co-opt the major players pre-conflict with investment offers they can’t refuse (the Chinese route).

    if we combined our chocolate (military interventions with a moral compass) with China’s peanut butter (economic interventions with a practical mindset), we might actually come up with a whole superpower, or basically a joint offering that finally covers the market—as in, defeats our political enemies while connecting the economically disenfranchised.

    This approach of course means more carnage like Rwanda, in a worst case scenario. But TPMB counters that military intervention gets US soldiers needlessly killed. Moreover the debate raises fundamental questions about R2P.

    The outcome of this matter is crucial because many governments are currently rethinking their militaries.