It’s not the refugees, it’s the austerity measures!
Rather than the cause of Africa’s economic crises, refugees are themselves victims of the political and economic decisions that produce displacement, deprivation, and insecurity.
Global Migration
Why does Tunisia become African only when Europe needs it to be?
Tunisia is a Mediterranean market when Brussels wants trade, and an African frontier when Brussels wants border control.
Deported to Liberia, again
Two centuries after the American Colonization Society shipped free black Americans to Liberia, Washington is sending its unwanted there once more.
Reading List: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
What if migrant environments, so often cast as scenes of abjection, border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, are instead repositories of knowledge, craft, and refined domesticity?
What Europe’s migration deals are really buying
European officials are calling the EU-Mauritania migration deal a success. Here’s what the numbers don’t count.
The country they never left
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.
Where do the borders really lie?
In Nairobi, migrants face not just national frontiers but invisible barriers in policing, housing, and work.
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.
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.
Minnesota was promised to us
Somalis have answered Trump’s latest racist tirade not with outrage but with a tidal wave of trolling.
Paying for citizenship
What began as a revenue lifeline for small island states has become a global market where the wealthy buy mobility and sovereignty itself becomes a commodity.
Empty riddles
Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.
The invention of foreigners
From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.
Djinns in Berlin
At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.
Colonize then, deport now
Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.
From Cape To Cairo
When two Africans — one from the south, the other from the north — set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?
A migrant’s tale
On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony — offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.
South Africa’s American refugees
Cape Town’s digital nomads chase cheap luxury and scenic backdrops — but behind the matcha lattes and “social impact days” lies a deeper story of economic power, displacement, and global inequality.
The other route to the American dream
With Europe increasingly closed, West African migrants are turning to the US — via Latin America. But the journey is long, dangerous, and brutally expensive, raising urgent questions about global responsibility.
In search of Saadia
Who was Saadia, and why has she been forgotten? A search for one woman’s story opens up bigger questions about race, migration, belonging, and the gaps history leaves behind.