• Gerard Akindes

Can a continent dominate global football while losing control of its own game?

• Olufemi Terry

Football’s three mixed Maghrebi and Black African stars are not emissaries of a new pan-Africanism. And the continent doesn’t need them to be.

• Giovanni Wanneh

Part performer, part cultural ambassador, and increasingly, a political flashpoint.

• Alex Hochuli

As club football becomes increasingly placeless and commercialized, international football begins to feel strangely real again.

• Nyasha Karimakwenda

Despite renewed efforts to criminalize and erase queerness, LGBTQ Africans continue to challenge the myth that their lives and identities are somehow un-African.

• Dawson McCall

The refusal of the US government to admit Somali referee Omar Artan is a reminder that the United States has a long history of using sports as a tool of exclusion, especially when it comes to African and African-descended athletes.

• Alex Čizmić

Bosnia’s World Cup squad is built on the descendants of war and displacement, players raised across Europe and North America who are finding their way back through football.

• Buster Kirchner

Why are the religious practices of African footballers treated as strange when athletes around the world turn to faith and superstition to navigate the game’s uncertainty?

• Maher Mezahi

The exclusion of Somali referee Omar Artan hardens the contradiction at the heart of the 2026 World Cup: a global tournament increasingly shaped by the politics of exclusion.

• 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.

• Boima Tucker

The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.

• Guido Melo

AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.

• Grace Tabea Tenga

At the 61st Venice Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial vision shaped a landmark exhibition, even as questions of representation, solidarity, and cultural authority continued to haunt the African pavilions.

• Sherry L. Zane

The new Michael Jackson biopic turns a politically conscious Black artist into a raceless fantasy figure, erasing the civil rights struggles, global solidarities, and histories that shaped him.

• 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.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal FC transformed English football’s relationship to African players, becoming a symbol of diaspora identity, Black internationalism, and global modernity.

• Lina Abushouk

The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive.

• 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.