Moral clarity is not enough
Gustavo Petro’s “economy for life” speaks to real crises. But without a rigorous political economy behind it, progressive movements risk mistaking the symptoms for the disease.
Politics
How to build a just green future
From Latin America to Africa, the struggle over minerals, energy, and sovereignty is forcing a deeper reckoning with capitalism, climate change, and the unequal architecture of the global economy.
Who is an Arab?
In the United States, Arabs are rendered white or nonwhite depending on the political needs of empire, war, and racial control.
The price of survival
South Africa’s municipalities are collapsing under a neoliberal model that treats water, electricity, and sanitation as commodities to be sold rather than rights to be guaranteed.
The new scramble for Congo
Backed by the Trump administration, US mining firms, financiers, and tech investors are mounting an aggressive push into the DRC’s mineral sector, reviving an old imperial logic under the language of strategic competition.
The return of Mwalimu
As debates on industrial policy revive, Nyerere’s legacy offers a critical archive of both the promise and limits of socialist development.
From Mubarak to Sisi
What began as a familiar security state has hardened into something new: a unified coercive order that governs Egypt through violence, surveillance, and permanent emergency.
When the peacemaker clocks out
Kenya’s shift toward trade-led diplomacy underscores the difficulty of sustaining regional leadership under conditions of fiscal dependence.
Kenya’s goon economy
Across the country’s urban centers, young men are being recruited into political militias that offer quick cash, fleeting power, and little chance of escape.
Pope Leo and the strongmen
The Pope’s African tour tested whether the papacy can speak to ordinary people without becoming a prop for authoritarian power.
After the Jamahiriya
Fifteen years after NATO’s intervention in Libya, economic collapse and foreign subjugation have fueled renewed support for Gaddafi-era stability.
How to fix a match for $280
Burundi’s football league rarely draws headlines — making it an easy target for match-fixing networks now entrenched in its top division.
Fields of dependency
As the US-Israel war on Iran disrupts fertilizer supply, Africa’s reliance on imported inputs exposes the deeper political economy driving food insecurity.
The demographic dividend no one wants to pay
Although increasingly celebrated as an asset, Africa’s youth remain locked out of power and decent work.
The debts our parents left us
The language of fiscal consolidation is meant to sound inevitable. But for Kenya's informal workers, the human cost is anything but abstract.
Who gets to be a civilian?
Often in war, language is twisted and used to change meaning, to dehumanize, to invent enemies, and to justify atrocities.
The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes
As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
Being right at the wrong time
Prominent cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s calls for negotiation reflect practices already in use, but in Nigeria’s polarized digital space, nuance is punished.
Where mining and conservation meet
Far from signaling a break from the past, the convergence of mining and conservation in West Africa underscores a recurring pattern that stretches back to colonialism.
Could expanding protected land undermine biodiversity?
Paradoxically, conservation efforts in Liberia and Senegal are threatening native ecology.