Despite outward appearances of crisis, the prospects for sustained peace and security in the Great Lakes region of Africa are better today than at any time since the mid-1980s.

Review of The Shackled Continent by Robert Guest.

Hotel Rwanda's messageis thattoo many officials of developed countries--and of the United Nations--still act as though Africans were dirt.

Review of The Battle for Zimbabwe, by Geoff Hill,andThe Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives, by Robert Guest.

A review of Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Hearth of Despair; A History of Fifty Years of Independence (PublicAffairs, 2005).

There are ways to combat the troubling accountability gap in refugee protection in the developing world.

Although this brief survey of five current case studies of UN peacekeeping is necessarily summary in nature, I believe that the evidence forms a sufficient pattern to conclude that the UN is substantially overextended and in danger of becoming more so.

Few seem willing to admit that the UN's most profound failure has been in the area of global security, the very reason for which it was brought into existence.