When the peacemaker clocks out
Kenya’s shift toward trade-led diplomacy underscores the difficulty of sustaining regional leadership under conditions of fiscal dependence.
Politics
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.
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.