Friday’s Reading List

By Taylor Marvin

Writing and analysis I found interesting this week:

Does the United States’ overwhelming military dominance encourage it to neglect the peace-building resources of its diplomatic corps?

The American Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to suspend the importation of elephant trophies from Tanzania and Zimbabwe — where limited hunting is legal — spurs controversy. Hunting brings money into local economies and can fund anti-poaching efforts by governments, but others assert that encouraging the killing the threatened and emotional creatures is simply wrong.

Despite a comfortable lead in South African elections — the first to feature voters with no memory of the pre-1994 white rule — is the dominant African National Congress headed towards one day falling from power?

Brazil’s struggle to extend universal healthcare to a diverse, unequal, geographically-enormous country of 200 million people, and what its uneven efforts can teach the US.

Via Jay Ulfelder, Venezuelan security forces find their less-than-lethal arsenal growing less effective over time, as demonstrators learn to counter weapons like tear gas.

Daniel Solomon charts the similarities and differences between the 2012 Stop Kony — focused on influencing the US to devote greater attention to the hunt for the insurgent group the Lord’s Resistance Army — and today’s #BringBackOurGirls — created by Nigerians to draw attention to the recent Boko Haram mass kidnapping –activist campaigns.

Last week CJ Chivers and Noah Sneider spoke with eastern Ukraine’s armed separatists — divide the country along the Dnieper River, says one.

Finally, at Political Violence at a Glance, more links.