Congo

4 November 2008, 0405 EST

As many of us remain riveted to the final hours of the 2008 US Presidential campaign, the people of the Congo face a more dangerous and destructive contest: Gen. Laurent Nkunda’s offensive against the Congolese government. The offensive has produced a major refugee crisis: “Last week’s fighting in the east of the country displaced up to 100,000 civilians, of whom 60 per cent were children, the United Nations Children’s Fund said yesterday.” Both France and the UK are considering military options; the UN has arranged for talks between Rwanda–which backs Nkunda’s Tutsi force–and the Congo in hopes of, at the very least, creating breathing space for international aid to reach the refugees.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.