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.
Politics
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.
Could expanding protected land undermine biodiversity?
Paradoxically, conservation efforts in Liberia and Senegal are threatening native ecology.
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.
Trumpism in Nigeria
Why does the anti-Black racism of the US president have defenders in Africa’s largest Black nation?
After the subcontracting state
The withdrawal from the port city of Berbera by regional powers distracted by war, marks the end of an external system that managed the Horn of Africa—and the beginning of a deeper structural collapse.
Greater Israel and the new regional order
Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran are not discrete crises but interconnected fronts in a broader project of regional dominance.
Senegal’s theater of morality
As debt mounts and police violence on campuses goes unanswered, Senegal’s government is targeting its queer citizens.
Where do the borders really lie?
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
Pilgrimage to power
From John Paul II to Benedict XVI, papal visits to Cameroon have often come when Paul Biya’s government faced political turmoil.
Who speaks for Iran?
Between imperial narratives and state propaganda, debates about the war on Iran often erase the diversity of Iranian society and the voices of its marginalized communities.
The arrest protocol on my fridge
A year after ICE detained Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, pro-Palestinian organizers in the United States are living under the threat of arrest, detention, and deportation.
Slow death by food
Illegal gold mining is poisoning Ghana’s soil and rivers, seeping into its crops and seafood, and turning the national food system into a long-term public health crisis.
The Imam against the insurgents
The potential return of exiled cleric Mahmoud Dicko to Mali could challenge jihadist movements by reopening political space and contesting their claim to religious authority.
A sick health system
The suspension of three doctors following the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s son has renewed scrutiny of a health-care system plagued by impunity, underfunding, and a mass exodus of medical professionals.
From Mogadishu to Minneapolis
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota ignores a longer history: decades of US intervention that helped produce the violence and displacement Somalis fled.
The empire strikes Iran
The US-Israeli war on Iran is the latest expression of a long imperial pattern—one shaped by opportunistic intervention, Western alignment, and the enduring racialized logic of empire.
We, the illegals of France
France’s mass deportation orders reveal how colonial logics persist in migration policy, turning former subjects into administrative problems to be expelled.
Betraying Abuja’s green soul
The Federal Capital Territory’s green belts were designed as flood buffers and cooling lungs. But under its current leadership, they are becoming patronage spoils.