Tag Archive for: Politics

Daring peace: Sant’egidio’s method of dialogue in a world at war

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At a time when more than fifty armed conflicts rage across the globe, the urgency of peace could not be clearer. This was the message brought to New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, where Marco Impagliazzo, President of the Community of Sant’Egidio, delivered a powerful lecture entitled Daring Peace. The event, which also featured remarks from Andrea Bartoli, president of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue and a Columbia University scholar, offered both a historical perspective and a call to action for peace building in today’s fractured world.

Sant’egidio’s legacy

Founded in Rome in 1968, Sant’Egidio is a lay Catholic movement rooted in prayer, service to the poor, and the pursuit of peace. Today, it is active in over 70 countries, working with marginalized communities while also mediating conflicts on the international stage. Its best-known achievement remains the Mozambique peace agreement of 1992, a landmark example of how patient dialogue can end years of bloodshed. Since then, Sant’Egidio has been involved in numerous other efforts, including initiatives in Algeria in the 1990s, and more recently in South Sudan.

The human cost of war

Professor Impagliazzo underscored why the theme of peace is so pressing today. In every war, he reminded the audience, “the first victims are the defenseless: children, women, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.” War, he said, “continues to kill long after it has ended,” leaving deep wounds in societies where almost all casualties are civilians. Whether in Syria, Yemen, Libya, or South Sudan, the devastation has counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives lost or displaced.

Quoting Pope Pius XII’s famous words “everything is lost in war, nothing is lost in peace”, he invited listeners to reflect on the futility of violence and the enduring hope that dialogue offers.

The path of peace

From Mozambique’s experience, Impagliazzo emphasized that “peace is not achieved with a magic wand. It is built little by little.” Far from being naïve, peace requires realism, sacrifice, and perseverance. War may feel more instinctive, more logical, especially when fueled by the mentality of victimhood, but as he reminded the audience, “war begins long before weapons are used. Hate and propaganda begin in the mind.”

Building peace, therefore, means confronting the culture of the enemy and daring to see the other not as a stranger but as a brother. He stressed: “peacemaking is not synonymous with surrender. Politics can achieve what war cannot. History teaches us that war does not resolve crises; it multiplies them through revenge and more wars.”

Friendship as resistance

What can ordinary people do in such a bleak context? Impagliazzo urged resistance to hatred and nationalism. He insisted on the underestimated power of friendship, sympathy, and human connection: “We need the force of sympathy. We need to stop people from being infected with hatred. True resistance is taking the time to understand each other, exploring other ways, and giving peace a chance.”

Peace, he concluded, is inseparable from hope. “There is no peace without hope, but peace itself gives hope”. He adds that those who believe in peace are not the idealists. They are the realists. The true idealists are those who think you can magically solve problems through war.

A call to action

One distinctive aspect of Sant’Egidio’s method is confidentiality: creating discreet spaces where adversaries can meet, listen, and begin to articulate a shared vision for peace. Much of its work takes place away from the headlines, but its quiet impact has transformed nations.

In our current environment where the temptation to resort to arms remains strong, Sant’Egidio’s example is a reminder that the courage to dialogue is perhaps the most daring and the most necessary form of resistance.

 

 

 

Women leaders gather in New York for high-level forum on political leadership

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New York, September 27, 2025 — The Africa Women Leaders Network (AWLN) is set to host a landmark high-level forum on women’s political leadership in New York, on the margins of the 80th Session of  United Nations General Assembly(UNGA80). This event will bring together government delegates, parliamentarians, civil society actors, and youth leaders to chart a bold path forward for women’s leadership across Africa and the world under the theme, “High-Level Africa Women’s Leadership Forum: Advancing Women’s Political Leadership in Africa.”

Background

The timing of the forum is both symbolic and urgent. It comes as the international community reflects on the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, a milestone agreement that set the global agenda for gender equality. While progress has been made since 1995, across Africa, women are increasingly taking up leadership roles in governance, business, civil society, academia, and community development. Despite progress, barriers such as gender inequality, limited access to resources, and underrepresentation in decision-making spaces persist. The High-Level Africa Women Leadership Forum seeks to provide a platform for dialogue, networking, and strategic action to amplify women’s voices and leadership across sectors.

This gathering will therefore focus on accelerating change, not only by celebrating trailblazers but also by building alliances, mobilizing resources, and equipping women to step into political leadership.

The Africa Facility for Women in Political Leadership

Central to this effort is the Africa Facility for Women in Political Leadership, a flagship initiative in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the African Union (AU) under AWLN’s Governance and Political Participation pillar. The initiative aims to create a robust support system for women in politics through:

  • Leveraging leadership training to strengthen campaign management,
  • Conducting research and policy analysis to dismantle structural barriers
  • Establishing safe spaces to protect women against gender-based political violence

Distinguished leaders and trailblazers

The Forum will feature the voices of prominent leaders who have shaped the course of women’s leadership in Africa and globally, including:

  • H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Former President of the Republic of Liberia & AWLN Patron
  • H.E. Sahle-Work Zewde, Former President of the Republic of Ethiopia & AWLN Elder
  • H.E. Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations
  • Ms. Ahunna Eziakonwa, Assistant Administrator, Assistant Secretary General, and Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa

A platform for change

Beyond the policy discussions and institutional frameworks, this Forum is above all a gathering of women who carry stories, resilience, and vision. From presidents to young leaders, their presence in New York is a reminder that every step forward is hard-won, and every voice matters.

As the world reflects on 30 years since Beijing, this moment is not only about commitments: it is about courage, solidarity, and the belief that when women lead, the entire societies rise.

Charlie Kirk’s death and the hypocrisy of tolerance

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Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy period. A young man, barely 31 years old, gunned down while doing what he always did: speaking his truth in public. I did not agree with Charlie on everything. I often found his stance on guns too extreme, his nationalism too rigid, his immigration policies too harsh for someone like me, an immigrant who knows the long wait and the sacrifices to build a life here, and much more. But admiration does not require blind loyalty. I followed him because he was sharp, brilliant in debate, and unafraid to say what he believed, even when it made him unpopular. That courage deserves respect.

What devastates me more than the bullet that ended his life is the reaction I see from many who claim the banner of tolerance. Celebrating a man’s death because he was your political opponent is not justice. It is cruelty. It is hypocrisy. To mock his death because he opposed gun control is to treat a tragedy as a punchline. To cheer because you disliked his worldview is to reveal that your so-called tolerance was only a mask, one that falls the moment someone dares to think differently. And this celebration is not harmless noise on the internet; it reflects a deeper sickness in our society, a culture that has lost the ability to separate disagreement from dehumanization.

This is bigger than Charlie Kirk. This is about who we are becoming as a society. We are entering a dangerous age where disagreement equals dehumanization, where debate is replaced by cancellation, and where violence is justified if the target is the “enemy.” But what future can we build on that foundation? If every life is only as valuable as its ideology, then none of us are safe. The same logic that excuses violence against one opponent today can be used to excuse violence against another tomorrow. A society that normalizes selective empathy is a society that prepares its own downfall.

And let us not forget: Charlie Kirk was not only a commentator; he was a husband and the father of two young children. Behind the headlines and the controversies is a family whose life has been irreparably shattered. Two children will now grow up without their father, a wife will bury her partner, and yet some among us see only a political victory. If we cannot pause to recognize the human cost of this tragedy, then our moral compass is broken beyond repair.

I am African, I am Christian, I am an immigrant, and I hold views that put me on neither extreme of the political spectrum. I believe in compassion for the vulnerable and in responsibility for the able. I believe in protecting life while respecting pluralism. I believe in family, faith, democracy, fairness and individual freedom. And precisely because of those values, I cannot stand by silently when hatred masquerades as justice. Democracy itself cannot survive if we only grant empathy to those who agree with us. Freedom means nothing if we use it to cheer the silencing of others.

Charlie Kirk is gone, but the real test remains for the rest of us: will we use moments like this to deepen the spiral of division, or will we step back and remember the humanity of those we oppose? If we cannot mourn the death of someone we disagreed with, then we have lost something far greater than a political battle. We have lost our soul. And if a nation loses its soul, no amount of progress, no accumulation of wealth, and no victories in the culture wars will save it from collapse.

  We are not moving forward. We are marching backward into barbarism.

The Political orphanhood of african immigrant voters and Why this NYC race feels different

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African immigrants in New York City live a paradox. We are visible in the workforce, in churches, in community associations — yet invisible when political campaigns draw their maps. We are nurses, Uber drivers, small business owners, home health aides, engineers, and teachers. We fill the city’s arteries with our labor. But politically, we remain unclaimed.

Split between two incomplete choices

We do not vote as a bloc. Some of us lean toward the Democratic Party because of its pro-immigration policies. Others quietly agree with Republican rhetoric on personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and the dignity of hard work. But neither party has fully spoken to us. Democrats too often stop at representation and identity politics. Posing for photos in our cultural clothing, but rarely returning to discuss policy after the campaign is over. Republicans often speak to our values on work and family, but alienate us with rhetoric and policies that seem blind to our immigrant realities.

This is why, even in deep-blue New York, I have met African voters — many of them first-generation immigrants — who were drawn to Donald Trump. Not because they embraced every policy or every word, but because he spoke, loudly and unapologetically, about work, affordability, and the feeling that “everyday people” had been forgotten. In immigrant barber shops in the Bronx, over attiéké in Harlem restaurants, and in Sunday church gatherings, I have heard uncles and aunties say the same thing: “I don’t agree with everything, but he talks about real life.”

Our political orphanhood is compounded by the way our lives straddle two worlds. We send money back home while paying sky-high rent here. We juggle double shifts not only to survive, but to build enough credit to own a home. We dream of starting businesses but spend months navigating city bureaucracy. Many of us are registered to vote, yet don’t see ourselves in campaign messaging, so we quietly abstain.

A different kind of leftist candidate

That is why the candidacy of Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani feels different. He is from the left, yet his campaign is not built on baiting controversial identity battles and baseless fear mongering. Instead, he is talking about the kitchen-table issues that shape the lives of working-class families: fare-free buses so workers keep more of their paycheck; rent-stabilization that actually protects tenants; higher wages that match the real cost of living in New York; universal childcare so parents can work without fear of losing everything to daycare bills.

These are not abstract promises. They touch daily life. For the Ghanaian home health aide in the Bronx who spends $132 a month on a MetroCard. For the Senegalese father in Queens who pays half his salary in rent. For the young Burkinabè graduate in Harlem juggling two part-time jobs because entry-level wages can’t cover student loans.

In my 11 years in the United States, I have seen many politicians pass through our spaces: shaking hands, speaking a few words in our languages, posing for photos, only to vanish after Election Day. I have never felt truly comfortable aligning with one, until now. Not because of party loyalty, but because the conversation is about life, not labels.

This race is not about left versus right, progressive versus moderate. It is about whether New York City can elect a leader who understands that its future depends on those who still believe in its promise enough to keep building here. The African diaspora in NYC is large enough to matter, diverse enough to shape outcomes, and tired of being politically invisible. This election could be the moment we step forward.

Sortir du lot. Savoir saisir l’instant

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Transformer une scène maladroite en levier d’influence

 

La récente rencontre entre Donald Trump et plusieurs chefs d’État africains fait couler beaucoup d’encre. Oui, il y a eu des maladresses diplomatiques. Mais non, le problème n’est pas cette polémique stérile autour de la photo.

Des chefs d’État invités à se présenter eux-mêmes. Trump qui complimente le président du Liberia , un pays anglophone pour sa maîtrise de la langue anglaise. Des discours truffés de flatteries, jusqu’à cette discussion gênante sur le Nobel de la paix.

Et pourtant… dans ce théâtre maladroit, un homme a appliqué une règle fondamentale du pouvoir :

“Ne jamais apparaître comme celui qui demande. Offrez, proposez, mais ne vous soumettez jamais.” — Robert Greene

Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, président du Gabon, n’est pas venu chercher des faveurs. Il est venu vendre une vision, dans un langage que Trump comprend : pouvoir, business, pragmatisme.

  • Il n’a pas dénoncé le déséquilibre : il l’a retourné.
  • Il n’a pas supplié : il a repositionné.
  • Il a compris que, dans certaines arènes, la dignité se défend par la posture, pas par la protestation.

L’art du miroir : parler à l’autre dans sa propre langue

Nguema s’est présenté à Trump en miroir, reflétant ses obsessions :emploi, souveraineté, compétitivité  pour y insérer les priorités du Gabon. Et surtout, il a transmis un message clair : “Nous ne courons pas après l’Amérique. Mais nous savons jouer avec les règles de l’Amérique.”

Trump aime le pragmatisme ? Il lui répond : « Je suis un général, moi aussi j’aime le pragmatisme. »Trump veut relocaliser la production industrielle ? Le Gabon veut aussi transformer ses matières premières localement, créer de l’emploi pour ses jeunes, et ainsi réduire les drames de l’immigration.

Dans un clin d’œil subtil à la politique migratoire américaine, il rappelle que les jeunes Africains ne choisissent pas de mourir en mer : ils fuient l’absence de perspectives. Créer de la valeur sur place, c’est aussi servir, en amont, les intérêts de l’Occident.

Mais le coup de maître, c’est cette phrase, lancée sans agressivité mais avec autorité :

« Notre marché est ouvert. Si vous ne venez pas, d’autres viendront. »

Une phrase simple, mais redoutablement stratégique. Car elle inverse le rapport. Ce n’est plus l’Afrique qui court après les investisseurs : c’est le monde qui doit saisir l’opportunité ou la laisser passer. Et dans un monde multipolaire, c’est une vérité. Ce que Brice a réussi, c’est ce que peu osent faire : exister stratégiquement dans un cadre déséquilibré, sans soumission ni arrogance.

Robert Greene l’écrit dans Les Lois de la Nature Humaine : « Le pouvoir ne se gagne pas dans l’émotion, mais dans la maîtrise des dynamiques sociales. »

Ce jour-là, le président a sans doute gagné le respect d’un homme qui ne comprend que les rapports de force. Et ça, c’est une victoire silencieuse mais déterminante.