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.
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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.
SPORTS
The football gambling industry across Africa preys on the risk factors built into the game. The only viable solution is investing in durable, developmental frameworks at the grassroots level.
Culture
Whose progress?
A new documentary reveals how Ethiopia’s manufacturing push redistributes land, labor, and opportunity — delivering gains for some while displacing others.
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.
African Perspectives on 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.