• Sada Malumfashi

Nigeria’s democracy has become dangerously fixated on capturing the presidency. Reviving regional politics may be the country’s best hope for rebuilding democratic accountability.

• Shreya Parikh

Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity.

• Kawthar Jeewa

A landmark housing ruling in Cape Town and anti-migrant marches in Durban look like opposite stories. But they are two extremes of the same colonial question: who is permitted to occupy space?

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh
• Scott Timcke

From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it

• Mebratu Kelecha

Successive debt regimes in Ethiopia have shown that external finance can protect sovereignty, finance coercion, or build development, sometimes all at once.

• Wangui Kimari

The Kenyan government’s reaction to the present moment of necessary generational disobedience resembles the way colonial regimes used to respond to the question of the “detribalized native.”

• Mandla Radebe
• Vijay Prashad

Kevin Cox’s NLR essay on South Africa claims to correct liberal and culturalist accounts through historical materialism. But it reproduces the very epistemic and analytical failures it sets out to overcome.

• Gunnett Kaaf
• Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

The Conference of the Left was not a solution to the crisis of the South African left, but an opening. What follows must be built differently from what came before.

• Okakah Onyango

Although the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya was framed as a partnership, it was actually France desperately looking for a new door into a continent that wants to throw it out.

• Khwezi Mabasa

The leaders of South Africa’s anti-migrant movement claim that Black African migrants are primarily responsible for unemployment, crime, and failing public services. None of these claims is supported by evidence.

• Cheriese Dilrajh

Although the UAE doesn’t occupy territory, it arms militias, controls ports, and launders violence through the language of development. Sudan is paying the price.

• Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.

• Niall Reddy

A much-anticipated “Conference of the Left” was supposed to unite South Africa’s progressive forces. Instead, it confirmed the harder truth: the left doesn’t need unity, it needs rebuilding.

• Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh

In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.

• Djiguikôrô

The violence unfolding in Mali reflects a deeper political impasse: how to sustain popular aspirations for emancipation without collapsing into military authoritarianism.

• Yusuf Serunkuma

Across Africa, governments are elevating STEM education while sidelining the humanities. But science and technology are never neutral, and technical expertise alone cannot transform society.

• Matías Vernengo

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.

• Thea Riofrancos

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.

• Farrah Elatty

In the United States, Arabs are rendered white or nonwhite depending on the political needs of empire, war, and racial control.

• Siyabulela Mama
• Lily Manoim

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.