Clair MacDougall
Clair MacDougall is an independent journalist who reports throughout Africa from her base in the western Sahel region, where she is currently reporting on the security and humanitarian crisis there. She holds an honor's degree in political theory and a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In February 2021, the International Center for Journalists awarded MacDougall for her article on the first official death of a UN peacekeeper from Covid-19, published jointly by PassBlue and The Daily Beast.
- Clair MacDougall
- • August 21, 2023
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MONROVIA, Liberia — Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee stood behind a wooden podium in a cramped conference room and recounted her narrow escape from one of the worst massacres in Liberia’s civil war, a devastating conflict that ended 20…
- Categories: Africa, Child Soldiers, International Justice
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- Clair MacDougall
- • September 23, 2022
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As the speeches by world leaders in the General Assembly begin to wind down, the focus stays on the devastating war in Ukraine and its rippling effects across the globe, the warming Earth and other serious crises that continue…
- Categories: Africa, General Assembly, Secretary-General, Security Council
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- Clair MacDougall and Maggie Dwyer
- • July 4, 2022
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — As the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) announced a lifting of sanctions against the Malian military junta on Sunday, the news may be especially welcome to the nearly two and a half thousand…
- Categories: Africa, Peace and Security, Secretary-General, Security Council, UN Peacekeeping
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- Clair MacDougall
- • March 23, 2022
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As the world’s deadliest United Nations mission, in Mali, registered its first two peacekeeper deaths for 2022 from improvised explosive devices, uncertainty looms over the role that the French military operation Barkhane will play in helping protect UN bases…
- Categories: Africa, Security Council, UN Peacekeeping
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- Clair MacDougall and Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
- • March 16, 2022
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GOMA, Democratic Republic of the Congo — Next to a white, scratched United Nations hangar, soldiers in green-and-gray fatigues straddled parts of a Mi-8 Soviet-style helicopter, adjusting motors and rotors in the morning light of March 7. One member…
- Categories: Africa, Security Council, UN Peacekeeping
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- Clair MacDougall
- • March 10, 2022
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Two-thousand civilian deaths. Countless “forced disappearances.” More than 1.7 million people displaced. The citizens of Burkina Faso have paid a price for the violent jihadist campaign leading up to Jan. 23, when the military seized…
- Categories: Africa, Human Rights
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- Clair MacDougall
- • December 23, 2021
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The world’s deadliest peacekeeping mission has recorded a twofold increase in fatalities among its troops from improvised explosive devices this year over last year, reinforcing what analysts say: more sophisticated attacks are being carried out by jihadists in Mali…
- Categories: Africa, UN Peacekeeping
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- Clair MacDougall
- • October 25, 2021
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Anta Guissé has spent a large part of her 20-year career defending people accused of war crimes in countries like Rwanda, Cambodia and the Central African Republic before United Nations-backed international tribunals and the International…
- Categories: Africa, Human Rights, Women
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- Clair MacDougall
- • October 11, 2021
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As a lawyer, Beth Jacob has represented both victims of the 9/11 attacks and the men imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay suspected of committing terrorism against the United States. A New Yorker now living in Washington, D.C., her Guantánamo clients…
- Categories: International Justice, Terrorism, US Foreign Relations
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- Clair MacDougall
- • July 20, 2021
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Yusuf Mingazov met his father, Ravil, for the first time through a videocall between a Red Cross office in Nottingham, Britain, and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, where he had been imprisoned for more than 14 years….
- Categories: Human Rights, Terrorism, US-UN Relations
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- Clair MacDougall
- • May 24, 2021
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Séverine Autesserre, a former humanitarian-aid worker, award-winning researcher and professor of political science at Columbia University, has become one of the foremost thinkers on international peace-building in the last decade. Following “Peaceland,” a book critically exploring the parallel worlds of United…
- Categories: Peace and Security, Security Council, Women as Changemakers
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- Clair MacDougall
- • May 10, 2021
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Liberian Dr. James Soka Moses remembers the West African region’s devastating Ebola outbreak as if it were yesterday: the roaring ambulances, the patients lying on the floor and spilling outside of treatment facilities, the smell of vomit and the…
- Categories: Africa, Covid-19, Health and Population
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- Clair MacDougall
- • March 31, 2021
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — From above, the photographs show a stretch of charred land in the middle of the desert and a mass grave covered in dried tree branches, where people living around Bounti, a village in central Mali,…
- Categories: Africa, Human Rights, Peace and Security, Secretary-General, Security Council
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- Clair MacDougall
- • February 8, 2021
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — A recent United Nations investigation has documented years of grave human-rights violations, including war crimes and other atrocities, in Mali that have gone unpunished as the UN peacekeeping mission there struggles to stabilize the troubled…
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- Clair MacDougall
- • November 19, 2020
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Monique Yéli Kam’s war room is not a typical campaign headquarters for a national presidential candidate. A dusty white marquis stands next to stacked blue chairs fanning out to a balcony that leads to a…
- Categories: Africa, Governance, Women
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