Some interesting articles:

1. Reasons not to treat religion as exogenous in your regression specification: a 1972 study of a Kenyan group who converted to Islam to avoid culturally-specified social obligations.
2. Jason Stearns has the most lucid description of the current fighting in eastern DRC that I’ve come across yet.
3. How simplifying narratives obscure the debate over conflict minerals in the DRC.
4. An anthropologist reads The Bottom Billion [PDF] and points out some serious flaws in Collier’s epistemological approach.