There’s a Greek deli in central Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi.
It’s hard to overstate how odd this is. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Bujumbura, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, is… basic. The roads are mostly unpaved. Much of it has no electricity; the parts that [...]

So now I’m in Burundi for a couple of weeks, on business.
I’ll probably do most of my Burundi-blogging over at my home blog. But here’s a thing: Burundi is part of La Francophonie and, yup, everyone here speaks French.
Okay, not everybody. French is introduced in primary school, but it’s not taught intensively until [...]

Le Monde reports on a fascinating crisis, one that incorporates essentially all the themes of the times. In northern Niger lurk huge reserves of uranium, and the French nuclear power industry covers about a third of its requirements from mines there owned by Areva SA. It was this mining industry that Joe Wilson was ordered [...]

Well, sort of. But don’t be scared, gentle readers, I’m not torturing you with a video of myself watching Edward Hugh watching Alex Harrowell watching me watching Edward, thus entirely disregarding the possible value of such a video for media theorists and social psychologists as well as the fact that all the cool kids are [...]

Thanks to Juan Cole I do not have to spend a great amount of time writing and explaining some key elements needed to understand multiculturalism, or the absence of it, in France. I’l give you a few quotes to digest and discuss.
The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are [...]

In the comments to a recent post, the question arose of the “natural boundaries” of the EU. Apropos of that, let us briefly consider those parts of the EU that are outside of Europe. Sometimes very far outside.
The EU has a formal name for these territories: they are “the Outermost Regions of Europe”. [...]

As people may have noted, last weekend Tobias and I were in Stockholm. One of the topics I wanted to post on but couldn’t was the latest Human Development report from the UN. There was plenty of press coverage: here, here, and here
There was even coverage in the blogs, but the tone seemed to [...]