As President Joe Biden left office, he sought to take credit for ending the War on Terror that began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But it’s not over, as Lisa Hajjar points out. A sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she just took her 16th visit to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There are 15 people still detained at Guantánamo, three of whom have long been cleared for release – and four of whom the U.S. government says it will never release and yet also will not put on trial. Hajjar explains the situation at the prison and the legal system invented to justify its indefinite – and indeed “forever” – detention of some people.

Fighting between the DRC’s armed forces and the M23 rebel group has reached new levels of intensity in the eastern part of the country, with claims and counter-claims about which one controls the region’s biggest city, Goma. Judith Verweijen and Michel Thill argue that the government in Kinshasa has made some poor strategic decisions about the country’s armed forces, among them steps taken three years ago to create a reserve army out of more than 100 armed groups. They set out why it was always doomed to fail.