[T]urning the page on decades of conflict and underdevelopment in the Horn of Africa will require … democratization and the institutionalization of transparent, accountable governance.

In the long run, a policy whose main focus is on improving so-called border management in countries that are known to trample human rights and disrespect the rule of law cannot be successful.

The most promising new paradigm calls for providing aid based on results, without … demanding adherence to particular plans.

[A]lthough the institutionalization of the ruling party organization after Meles's death ensured the immediate survival of the Ethiopian regime, we should not confuse short-term stability and growth with long-term sustainability.

Africa's regional organizations will … need to urgently improve their rapid response capacity to ensure that the continent does not keep relying for its security on self-interested external powers.

While transitional politics and the war against Al Shabab are dominating headlines, … a combination of intense pressures is making subsistence livelihoods less and less viable and producing massive, irreversible migrations with enormous long-term implications for Somalia and Kenya.

The third wave of democracy did sweep across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, but has now subsided, except for ripples and eddies.

Strategies to promote access to schooling are necessary but not sufficient for achieving successful learning for all of the region's children and young people.

Once the 2010 election passes without any meaningful change, the real contest among rival political and ethnic forces will work itself out in the theater of armed rebellion.

Paul Ehrlich held that voracious consumption would leave the West reeling when essential resources ran out. Julian Simon believed that people should be allowed to consume as they like because they can rely on technology or ingenuity to find a way forward. Both were too constricted in their perspective.

The [Clinton administration's] new African leaders policy was intended to be the story of peacemaking, partnership, and economic development. Instead, it became a subplot in a story of war, casualties, and the remaking of old African leaders.

One lesson learned since September 11 is that the expanded war on terrorism has created a lens that tends to distort our vision of the complex political dynamics of countries like Somalia. Local political realities are not always assessed in their own right, but instead are interpreted through, and reduced to, the logic of the war on terrorism.

Africa's well-known developmental political problems remain. … But these problems also exist in political communities in every other part of the world. More important, they do not exhaust the story of politics in Africa. For every horrific political story in Africa, there is another story of courageous and creative political enterprise accomplished under circumstances that those who live and vote in developed democracies could not even begin to imagine.