Regional Sanctions Against Burundi: A Powerful Campaign and Its Unintended Consequences

This paper examines the impact of regionally imposed sanctions on the trajectory of the Burundian regime and its involvement in the peace process following the 1996 coup in the country. Despite the country's socioeconomic and geopolitical vulnerability, the Buyoya government withstood the pressure from the sanctions. Through a vocal campaign against these sanctions, the new government mitigated the embargo's economic consequences and partially reestablished its international reputation. Paradoxically, this campaign planted the seed for comprehensive political concessions in the long term. While previous literature has attributed the sanctions' success in pressuring the government into negotiations to their economic impact, the government actually responded to the sanction senders' key demand to engage in unconditional, inclusive peace talks under the auspices of the regional mediator once the economy had already started to recover. The regime's anti-sanctions campaign, with its emphasis on the government's willingness to engage in peace talks, backfired, with Buyoya forced to negotiate after having become entrapped in his own rhetoric

Exact expressions for transient forced internal gravity waves and spatially-localized wave packets in a Boussinesq fluid

We re-examine a simple model describing the propagation of transient forced internal gravity waves in a Boussinesq fluid with constant horizontal mean velocity which was previously studied by Nadon and Campbell (Wave Motion, 2007). The waves are generated by a horizontally-periodic lower boundary condition and propagate upwards. We derive an alternative exact expression for the solution which more readily gives insight into the behaviour of the solution at high altitude. Some special cases of lower boundary conditions are considered to illustrate the features of the solution. This form of the solution allows us to use a Fourier transform to derive the solution for the more general situation where a wave packet is generated by a horizontally-localized lower boundary condition, comprising a continuous spectrum of horizontal wavenumbers or Fourier modes. This is a more realistic representation of internal gravity waves in the atmosphere and can be used as a starting point for investigating waves generated by an obstacle of finite horizontal extent such as an isolated mountain or a mountain range