Prénom de l'expert

Thierry

Nom de l'expert

VIRCOULON

Elections are held on a regular basis in various African countries, but democracy is far from flourishing.

Since 2013 and the victory of the Congolese armed forces and the United Nations over the last serious threat against the regime - the 23 March (M23) movement-, the question of the relevance of the UN presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is raised again.

Since achieving independence in 1962, Burundi has experienced several episodes of civil war, the last of which came to end when the Arusha Accord was signed in 2000. The gradual return to peace in the wake of the Arusha Accord has been jeopardised by Pierre Nkurunziza’s announcement on 25th April 2015 that he would stand as a candidate for the presidency.

For the new geopolitical reality called “Chinafrica”, the future may not be destined to be as radiant as the official win-win rhetoric would have us believe. Although the beginning of the century was notable for the exponential development of Sino-African trade (which grew from $10 billion in 2000 to $210 billion in 2013), a series of emerging problems seem to be signalling that the Sino-African honeymoon is over and that we are back with the harsh realities of the globalised economy.

In the course of its institutional development and the expansion of its activities, the European Union (EU) has tended to pile up rather than to rationalize its policies, creating a financial tool per objective. As a result, the European funds have become a labyrinth, for which management costs are high.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 32 years of dictatorship and almost ten years of war have bled the country dry and left its administration incapable of providing the population with basic services and the government incapable of applying or even formulating public policy.