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.
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A new history of Mombasa shows how street food, colonial labor migration, and urban capitalism reshaped what—and how—Kenya eats.
AFCON 2025
Our coverage of the 2025 edition of the African Cup of Nations from Morocco.
Culture
Afrobeats after Fela
Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance
Iran
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.
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 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.
Politics
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.
