THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES

Africa Shaped The Global 2030 Development Agenda. How It Can Influence What Comes Next

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:27:27 +0000

African countries need to agree on priorities to avoid accepting choices made elsewhere. Ian Panelo, Pexels

BY HAFTE GEBRESELASSIEGEBRIHET AND DAN BANIK

All United Nations member states adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. They cover poverty, health, education, inequality, climate change, peace and other global issues. The goals are now approaching their 2030 deadline.

The goals matter because they shape national plans, international cooperation and decisions about development funding. The question of what should follow them can no longer be postponed.

The UN has already begun preparing for that discussion. The Pact for the Future invites the High-level Political Forum, under the auspices of the General Assembly, to consider in September 2027 how sustainable development should be advanced by 2030 and beyond.

This gives the African Union and its member states about a year to agree on their priorities and influence the debate before its main ideas are settled.

Will Africa help write it, or simply respond to it?

We study Africa’s leadership in global development debates. A recent study led by Hafte Gebreselassie Gebrihet examines how the Common African Position, a shared set of African priorities for the negotiations that produced the SDGs, influenced the post-2015 development agenda. It shows that Africa has helped shape a global development framework before. In 2014, African governments adopted the common position while negotiations on the goals were still under way. It gave African negotiators a shared set of priorities before the final agreement was reached.

Entering the process with an agreed position gave them more influence. It identified structural transformation, decent work, science and technology, peace and security, environmental sustainability, development finance and more equitable global partnerships as priorities for the continent. Several of these ideas were later reflected in the SDGs.

This mattered because African governments had long been treated more as implementers of global development agendas than as agenda setters. Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s introduced major economic reforms across the continent with limited regard for African priorities. The Millennium Development Goals later focused global attention on poverty, health and education, but offered little space for a coordinated African role in defining the agenda itself.

The Common African Position changed that pattern. It showed that influence begins before leaders arrive at a summit, when priorities are defined, coalitions are built and negotiating language is drafted.

That lesson matters again.

Can the African Union do it again?

The Common African Position was not the product of easy agreement among African governments. It followed two years of political organisation and consultation.

The AU Assembly gave the African Union Commission responsibility for identifying continental priorities with member states and regional economic communities. The assembly also created a committee of ten heads of state and government. Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led it. The committee coordinated African leaders and built support beyond the continent.

Parliamentarians, regional organisations, civil society groups, women and young people, trade unions, academics and businesses contributed to consultations at national, regional and continental levels.

African and UN institutions provided technical support. After the common position was adopted, the AU Assembly told member states to speak with one voice. It also asked the committee to develop a plan for advocacy, negotiation and alliance building.

A similar effort is possible today. Africa still has time to shape the process.

The Addis Ababa Declaration, adopted in April 2026 at the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, calls for active and collective African engagement in shaping the post-2030 framework.

The declaration links the process to African priorities and the AU’s Agenda 2063. It sets out initial ideas for the next framework. It also asks Mauritius to present the declaration and its main messages at the 2027 summit and other international meetings.

But the declaration is a starting point, not a new common position.

Turning it into a formal continental negotiating position will require leadership from heads of state. The African Union Commission must coordinate the process. Governments must also consult widely and agree on priorities.

The next framework will be negotiated under very different conditions. Climate change has intensified. Debt has increased. Aid budgets are shrinking. Competition among global powers is changing international cooperation. New technologies are also creating opportunities and widening inequalities.

Africa’s experience with the Common African Position points to five ways the continent can strengthen its influence when negotiations begin.

Five crucial steps

1. Agree on priorities early

African leaders adopted the common position before the global goals were finalised. They entered the process with a common understanding of their priorities and interests.

The post-2030 framework may sound distant. But the ideas that will shape it are already being discussed. By the time governments enter formal negotiations, many of the main proposals will have been developed, debated and revised.

African governments should begin that work now, before the main choices are made.

2. Speak with one voice

The African Union has 55 member states. They have different political systems, economies and development priorities. Complete agreement is neither realistic nor necessary. But the 2014 experience showed that African countries can gain influence by agreeing on their main priorities.

A coordinated position gives negotiators greater leverage than dozens of separate national interventions. It also shows that certain concerns are continental rather than national.

This will matter in debates over climate finance, debt restructuring, access to technology and reform of international institutions.

3. Align the post-2030 agenda with Agenda 2063

Africa does not need to invent a new vision for itself every time the international community develops a new framework. It already has one.

Agenda 2063 sets out the African Union’s long-term aspirations for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful continent driven by its own citizens.

Building on Agenda 2063 would give the African position both continuity and political credibility.

The task is to ensure that the next global framework reflects priorities Africa has already chosen.

4. Focus on a limited number of strategic priorities

A long list of demands would weaken Africa’s negotiating position. A future common position should not include every challenge facing the continent. It should focus on issues where African countries have urgent needs and shared interests.

The priorities should include development finance, climate adaptation, debt sustainability, technological capacity and reform of global institutions.

A shorter list would help African negotiators defend each priority more consistently. It would also make it easier to build alliances and keep attention on the issues that matter most.

5. Move from reacting to agenda-setting

Africa’s influence increased when it helped define the debate rather than reacting to proposals developed elsewhere.

For decades, African countries have often been portrayed as recipients of development agendas designed by others. The Common African Position challenged that assumption. It showed that African governments can shape international priorities when they enter the process early, coordinate their positions and connect their concerns to wider global debates.

Before the 2027 SDG Summit, the African Union and its member states should agree on a concise post-2030 position rooted in Agenda 2063. Otherwise, Africa risks returning to a familiar role: accepting choices that were made elsewhere.

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Young Nigerian Women Want To Go Into Politics – Party Rules And Older Men Keep Them Out

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:05:04 +0000

Women and young people are grossly underrepresented in Nigeria’s politics. Fatima Yusuf/Pexels

BY OMOMAYOWA OLAWALE ABATI

SENIOR RESEARCH OFFICER,

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Nigerians will return to the polls in 2027. Campaigns will commence, crowds will fill the streets for party rallies, but the most consequential decisions about the elections are already happening. They are taking place in party offices, at the homes of powerful political godfathers, and in selection processes that most Nigerians never attend and sometimes don’t hear about.

This is where the most vulnerable group, young women, lose. Nearly half of Nigeria’s population is female and more than 70% is younger than 30 years. Yet women and young people continue to be grossly underrepresented in the country’s politics. Nationally, 6.7% of elected positions and appointments are occupied by women. The global average is 22.5% and Africa’s is 23.4%.

Those who want to contest for elective offices signify their interest at their wards, where they must secure support before going to the local governments or senatorial zones or states. This depends on the offices they want to vie for.

Two changes have been made in the past 10 years to address the underrepresentation of women and young people. The first was the 2018 Age Reduction Law, also known as Not Too Young to Run. It lowered the minimum candidacy age to 25 for State Houses of Assembly and the House of Representatives. Then in 2022 the country’s two dominant parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), announced fee waivers for women and a 50% discount for young aspirants. These are fees paid to political parties to purchase nomination forms.

But these changes have failed to shift the dial. Only two young women (aged under 30) won seats across Nigeria’s 36 state assemblies in the 2023 elections. Women aged between 30 and 35 managed to secure three seats in 2019 and 2023 state assembly elections. At the national level, the youngest women are in their 40s.

Our initial research as political scientists found that dominant political parties nominate only a few young (male and female) candidates. Minor parties field the highest numbers of young candidates.

In follow-up research, we studied the reason for this: examining how formal rules and informal norms of parties interact to shape the political candidacy of young women in Nigeria.

The research included 40 interviews with party leaders and candidates in the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party. We asked candidates about party selection practices and the roles of gatekeepers, money and godfathers, and how they navigate the party selection process. We asked party leaders about their statutory and non-statutory roles in selecting party candidates and what they perceived of young party aspirants.

What we found

We found that in Nigeria’s two dominant political parties, young women aspirants face a range of age- and gender-biased challenges.

These play out in:

visits to party elders, who are mostly elderly men, who hold the reins of power in these parties. While these visits are not obligatory, they are necessary in Nigeria to secure the support of the party elders

ancestral-lineage scrutiny, where the right of married young women to contest for political offices in their father’s and husband’s state of origin is questioned by senior male party members

“godfather networks” – sponsors of candidates, usually those with money to finance campaigns

financial barriers, where aspirants are not only expected to be up-to-date in payment of membership dues but are required to sponsor party events.

Our findings show that gender and youth disadvantage are reinforced through informal practices of parties. Our findings also expose why quotas or fee waivers can’t fix a system where the real gate-keeping happens in the shadows of internal party politics.

What’s not changed

Nigeria’s new Electoral Act 2026 abolished indirect primaries. This was a delegate convention system that gave party elites their most reliable tool for controlling outcomes. Previously, aspirants were informally expected to have sponsored delegates into party positions years in advance. Such positions are party offices at the ward, local government and state levels. These delegates will then vote during the indirect primaries.

One young male aspirant in Kwara told us he had facilitated key delegates’ emergence in 2015, “so in 2019, when the time came to lobby them, it was effortless”. No young woman we interviewed had built the same network. That particular mechanism is now unlawful.

With Section 87(2) also requiring that failed consensus on candidates’ selections must revert to direct primaries, not back-room elite bargaining, the law has narrowed some space for manipulation. The consensus option is where there are no primaries and candidates emerge by affirmation.

But three critical gaps remain.

First, Section 86 removes the detailed statutory procedures that previously governed direct primaries, including ward-level voting, equal opportunity for aspirants, and participation of all registered members, replacing them with a requirement that primaries follow “party guidelines”. The parties that have consistently excluded young women are now writing the rules of their own primaries.

Second, the 2026 Electoral Act introduces no cap on party nomination fees. The APC’s state assembly nomination form, which cost 2 million naira (US$1,465) in 2023, then a 135% increase from 2019, now costs 6 million naira (US$4,396), a 200% increase from the last election. This is not an electoral cost. It is a filter. The new law leaves it entirely unregulated.

Third, Sections 83(5) and (6) bar courts from hearing internal party matters. It means young women can’t challenge unlawful exclusion.

Moving forward

Other gaps remain ahead of 2027 elections:

a statutory cap on nomination fees, enforced by the Independent National Electoral Commission

enforceable youth-gender quotas at the candidate selection stage.

This would compel major parties to field young women in competitive seats, not merely posts under affirmative action.

These reforms would reduce the need for young politicians to solicit the support of powerful men. The question is whether the political will exists to change the rules.

Under-representation is not a supply problem. The evidence from 2023 shows young Nigerian women with political ambition came forward in large numbers. The bottleneck is demand, and what parties choose to do with them once they arrive.

Mayowa Adeniji contributed to the research on which this article is based.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

How A Network 0f Pink-Slime News Sites And Conservative Activists Went After Campus DEI

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 03:27:28 +0000

Using FOIA requests and hidden-camera videos, the groups targeted universities, leading to the firing of faculty and staff.

BY MIRANDA GREEN

In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.”

The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”

An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found that these efforts were bankrolled in part by donations from conservative philanthropists and foundations that have received funding from the Koch family. Charles Koch and his late brother, David, poured hundreds of millions into nonprofits and libertarian think tanks that promote education reform, among other things. “It is a fundamental attack on how academic ideas are created,” Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford and the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said. “Those ideas that get produced outside of interference are the ones that the billionaires, the donors, the right-wing political infrastructure are deeply and existentially threatened by.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy proposal that has become a lodestar of Trump administration policy, labeled higher education an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” As President Trump has called for an end to “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs, conservative groups have leveraged thousands of public records to publish articles and videos designed to shame institutions, professors, and students. The tactics have led to upheaval across public universities and to faculty terminations, and are part of a broader push to limit what can be taught at institutions of higher education. As of the end of 2025, more than half of college and university students lived in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. And the use of FOIA requests to extract information about course materials is triggering a widespread reexamination of what is considered a public record and what constitutes academic freedom.

“The sense of a kind of creeping right-wing net, in which they’re going to catch so-called left-wing faculty who are ‘indoctrinating their students,’ is widespread,” Joan Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose research focused on gender and academic freedom, told Tow. “And it has a chilling effect, which is the point.”

Last July, a national organization requested all syllabuses for seventy-four courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that included terms such as “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” “queer,” and “sexuality.” The requester was the Oversight Project, whose mission is to “expose and root out corruption in government, among elected officials, and in our most influential organizations.” The group claims to have filed more than a hundred thousand FOIA requests and nearly a hundred lawsuits since its start, in 2022.

“These things being syllabi, they should be transparently posted on the internet without us having to do it, and so we’re really the forcing function for that,” Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, told Tow. “Give it to the people of America so they can see for themselves as to whether schools are still teaching corrosive DEI concepts, and if it’s unlawful in any way.”

Howell has sent dozens of FOIA requests to various government agencies on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and another of its spin-offs, the Daily Signal, a conservative news website. In July, Howell and the Oversight Project sued the Department of Homeland Security in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking public records about the total number of “illegal aliens removed by the Department” and all voluntary departure data.

At UNC Chapel Hill, the Oversight Project’s request suggested that continuing to teach classes whose written materials contained words such as “sexuality,” “queer,” or “intersectionality” was against the law under executive orders Trump issued in the first days of his second term. “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with current Executive Orders,” Howell wrote in the request. He added that releasing the materials would “shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance.”

Though presidential executive orders are not laws, the UNC system had already directed the sixteen universities it oversees to stop requiring course credits related to DEI. (The system also issued waivers that allowed courses with titles such as “Feminist Theory” and “Social Work Policy and Restorative Justice” to continue being required for some majors.) Professors worried, however, that publicly releasing their syllabuses could lead to targeting by online groups and potential doxing. They started a petition to keep syllabuses private, arguing that publishing course materials “would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.”

“The FOIA stuff is yet another way of getting faculty into trouble at various universities and creating an atmosphere in which people are then afraid to teach,” Scott said. “The point is to not only go after individuals, as they’re doing in North Carolina right now. The point is to make an example of a few people so that the rest of us will comply.”

In July of 2025, UNC Chapel Hill sided with professors and denied the Oversight Project’s request. “Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments, and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer and are owned by the preparer as nontraditional work,” the university told Inside Higher Education at the time.

Efforts to use federal and state FOIA laws to “expose” university professors and administrators have been underway for decades, according to Zach Greenberg, the director of faculty legal defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit that works to protect freedom of speech on college campuses. “We’ve seen a lot of this occur in the 2010s targeting professors, usually from advocacy groups on specific issues. For example, you would have oil companies target environmentalists for their scholarly records at universities,” Greenberg said. “Some of it is to figure out what exactly is being taught at these universities, and others are just retaliatory and burdensome because of the nature of their request.”

Recently, though, the requests have grown more personal, Margaret Kwoka, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the author of Saving the Freedom of Information Act, said. “One thing we’re starting to see at the state level is a proliferation of what I think are being characterized as abusive or harassing requests that are more politically motivated,” Kwoka told Tow. Deciding what is legitimate and what is burdensome can be tricky, she said: “One person’s view of what is harassing is actually another person’s view of oversight.”

At the same time that North Carolina’s public universities were under pressure to provide class syllabuses, colleges across the country were receiving similar records requests from Metric Media. Metric operates nearly twelve hundred conservative-leaning local news sites, and has posted favorable articles in exchange for payment. In February of 2025, several local news sites owned by Metric sent the simultaneous FOIA requests to administrators at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Illinois, seeking emails and statements that included terms such as “Indigenous” and “Diversity.” But it didn’t end there.

That May, the same month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the US would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, Metric outlets started asking for detailed information about Chinese students and the departments in which they studied. In 2025, they sent at least four hundred and forty-seven records requests to universities from Florida to Alaska, asking universities to explain how they were monitoring students “to safeguard intellectual property and confidential information.” The papers also sought information about students’ ties to the China Scholarship Council. The organization funds Chinese citizens to study abroad in the US, and a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party had been pressuring colleges to cut ties with it.

Then, last summer and fall, according to a Tow analysis of Metric’s requests, Metric news sites sent universities across the US nearly a thousand requests for “course syllabi,” “university board member information,” and “college employee compensation data.” One of Metric’s founders, a former journalist named Brian Timpone, described the records requests as an attempt to hold higher-education institutions accountable. “Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children,” he told Sampan, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper that covers New England, last October. “When a parent has to send their child to a university many states away, rather than the state university for which they are paying, they should know the reason. They should know that hundreds of thousands of spots once reserved for in-state students are now given to foreign nationals who aren’t exceptional at all. It’s a complete outrage.”

Kentucky’s Murray State University was among the schools that received Metric’s requests. Timpone told its student newspaper last September that Metric wanted to find out whether state-funded colleges “are actually teaching, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.” Timpone did not respond to Tow’s request for comment.

University responses to Metric’s FOIAs were varied. Murray State, for example, provided Metric with Chinese student admission numbers for the 2024–25 school year, but said it had no records on how many scholarships they received, where the scholarships came from, or policies for monitoring students, the university confirmed to Tow. Southern Illinois University outright denied a request from the Carbondale Reporter, a Metric outlet, to release course syllabuses, stating that Illinois’s records laws exempt “course and research materials used by university faculty.” A University of Connecticut official told Metric that the school couldn’t legally release information about the departments where each student studied because doing so could identify them. But according to a June 27, 2025, response the university shared with Tow, it offered to provide Metric with information about which colleges the students attended. Stephanie Reitz, UConn’s director of media relations, said Metric representatives didn’t respond to the offer.

Blanket requests such as the ones filed by Metric have become easier thanks to software advances and the availability of AI. Between January of 2025 and January of 2026, according to Tow’s analysis, Metric filed more than nine thousand FOIA requests across all fifty states. Timpone has disputed that number, telling Tow: “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” According to the analysis, at least a quarter of those requests—twenty-two hundred and eighty-six—sought records about universities.

The mass filings have strained the agencies and departments charged with responding to requests. The backlog can make it impossible for other requesters, such as journalists and private individuals, to get public records from the same agencies. The Heritage Foundation has boasted about this impact, suggesting that gumming up the system is part of its goal. “Our team has been so effective at flooding government agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that government workers were complaining that ‘the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job,’” the Heritage Foundation wrote in its 2024 annual report. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Tow.

Mass FOIA filings can be deemed “vexatious,” a legal term that can allow agencies to refuse to answer them. The deluge of record requests has sparked discussion over whether the current FOIA system is broken, but some public records activists worry that any changes would further limit records access for everyone. Instead, they are advocating for new technology. “I think the government needs to do a better job pushing out information,” Kwoka, the Ohio State law professor, said. “And I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make a big difference in how many requests have to be made every year. Some key investments in technology and personnel would make a really big difference, and yet we just haven’t seen the political will to invest in those sorts of system improvements.”

The Oversight Project and Metric Media are just two of at least four groups backed by conservative donors that have targeted university professors over DEI policies and related teaching materials in the past eighteen months. Accuracy in Media, which describes itself as “a nonprofit that uses investigative journalism and cultural activism to expose corruption,” has released dozens of hidden-camera clips of interactions with professors and university staff who appear undeterred by laws or school policies limiting teaching about equity and inclusive philosophies. And the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that trains young conservative journalists, produces the College Fix, a news site whose coverage has been shared by right-wing outlets, including the Daily Caller and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Together, Metric Media, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association received more than fourteen million dollars for their 2024 operations, according to their most recently released 990 tax filings. That year, the Oversight Project was still part of the Heritage Foundation, which made more than a hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue. The Oversight Project’s 2025 tax filings have not yet been made public.

Metric, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association are registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are forbidden under federal tax law from engaging in election-related political activity. But these groups and the Oversight Project share the same handful of conservative backers, including Donors Trust, which Mother Jones described in 2013 as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” According to the groups’ 2024 tax filings, Donors Trust gave a total of 398,263 dollars to Accuracy in Media and the Student Free Press Association, and 734,673 dollars to the Heritage Foundation, which, at the time, controlled the Oversight Project. Donors Trust had given 1.27 million to Metric Media in 2020.

The Heritage Foundation, which has received more than 1.3 million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation, was another overlapping donor. In 2024, according to tax filings, it gave a hundred thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association as part of an “Innovation Prize.” In 2024, the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund advancing conservative ideas, whose president previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, gave 32,200 dollars to Heritage and forty thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association. “These people are saying, ‘We don’t like the ideas that are produced through scholarship. We like these other ideas that support our hierarchies, support our version of what the family should be,’” Kamola, the Trinity political science professor and author of Academic Freedom and Dark Money Donors, told Tow.

Kamola said that conservative groups intensified their focus on higher education after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, when they worried that calls for academic reform would necessitate federal intervention to enforce more equitable hiring practices and possibly even reparations. “If there is an argument that says states have a role in addressing systemic issues, then that’s a problem for those with these radical libertarian beliefs,” he told Tow, adding that, as a result, conservative groups have moved to “delegitimize” colleges and universities. “You create these controversies, so then the school is weak, and you can make it easier for your provocateur to come to campus, or for your Koch-funded academic center [to be built] in the name of viewpoint diversity.”

The power of such groups has grown during Trump’s second term. The author of Project 2025’s section on the Department of Education is Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s education policy director. In the document, she argued that the government should stop investing in “the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism.” She added: “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

Most of the groups that target university professors rely on the internet to spread their message. They often focus on a specific subject that has gained traction online, amplifying one another’s stories and videos through reshares and rewrites. After the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last fall, for example, right-wing activists combed educators’ social media accounts for negative comments about Kirk and posted teachers’ identities in an online “watchlist.” As a result, the American Association of University Professors told Tow that at least forty professors were terminated, suspended, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned.

Scott, the professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, said that though targeting academic institutions is not new, “the Trump administration has given them the opportunity to do it with a vengeance.” Greenberg, of FIRE, said the internet mob creates an “outrage machine” that chills free expression by making faculty think twice about what they say—and what they teach.

“Seeing senior colleagues being punished for speaking out, I can see why professors would self-censor accordingly,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them having thin skin. I think it’s a matter of institutions lacking the backbone and the principle to defend professors when people call for them to be punished for their expression.”

In 2024, Bethany Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, published a research paper about marriage and family dynamics. Conservative outlets the College Fix, the Washington Examiner, and Fox News quickly ran articles and a TV segment blasting Letiecq for criticizing what Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, called the “two-parent married family model.”

The negative coverage sparked death threats, including a phone call Letiecq said she received. (Letiecq reported the call to local police, who issued an arrest warrant for the caller.) George Mason, meanwhile, was about to face a controversy of its own. In June, Glenn Youngkin, who was then the governor of Virginia, appointed Kenneth Marcus to the university’s Board of Visitors, a policymaking and oversight committee. Marcus had previously served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which, in 2023, had named George Mason as one of dozens of universities under investigation for supposed Civil Rights Act violations related to “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”

When he was appointed to George Mason’s board, Marcus told the Jerusalem News Syndicate, “I’ve been proud to support Governor Youngkin’s recent work combating anti-Semitism here in Virginia, including his leadership in legislation adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.”

Letiecq and two colleagues wrote about Marcus’s political connections in an August 2024 op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed. Later that month, Letiecq was the subject of a blog post published by the nonprofit Defending Education under the headline “George Mason University (CorruptED).” The post targeted a course Letiecq taught and included a copy of her syllabus. According to tax filings, in 2024, Defending Education received nearly a million dollars from Donors Trust and five hundred thousand dollars from the Bradley Impact Fund.

“My syllabi ended up on the Defending Education website. I was like, ‘What is this about?’” Letiecq said. She had never heard of the group, but when Letiecq looked at its tax filings, she found a familiar name: Defending Education’s treasurer was listed as Kenneth Marcus.

“I feel like I was being retaliated against,” Letiecq said. She said she complained to the university. Democrats in the Virginia Senate ultimately blocked Marcus’s appointment to the board. Months later, Defending Education’s president, Nicole Neely, sent FOIA requests to George Mason seeking emails between the university and Letiecq that mentioned Marcus. Letiecq said she has not received notice from the university about whether her correspondence was released. Marcus did not respond to a request for comment.

“Back in the old days, we used to put all of our syllabi up [online] because that could facilitate students’ academic journey,” Letiecq said. Now, she said, doing so makes faculty feel like “sitting ducks and targets of this insanity.”

Educators caught in secretly recorded videos have experienced some of the worst professional consequences. Last spring, Accuracy in Media began posting to its YouTube channel selectively edited videos of university staff and professors talking about navigating DEI bans at their universities.

In “BUSTED: UWF Administrator Exposes Scheme to Evade Florida DEI Ban,” Aurora Osborn, an administrator at the University of West Florida and the director of the school’s Office of Campus Culture and Access, talks about using private funding to pay for diversity initiatives. “State funds cannot be used to be spent on certain programs that promote DEI, but there are other funds involved in running a university, for example donations,” Osborn says in the video.

Accuracy in Media has since posted nearly fifty other gotcha-style video investigations of professors and administrators at universities in states including Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Alabama. According to Inside Higher Ed, at least three university employees captured in the films were later removed from their positions. This past June, the Department of Justice announced it was starting a Title VI investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at Arizona State University following “recent viral videos” that it said showed the school had “denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin.” The DOJ didn’t offer specifics about the videos or link to them, but Accuracy in Media took credit. The organization pointed to a series it posted online that targeted Arizona State University professors and administrators.

Accuracy in Media declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Tow. “Accuracy in Media’s team of talented, dedicated investigative journalists are focused on determining whether highly paid university administrators are adhering to the law,” Adam Guillette, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “No taxpayer should be forced to pay the salaries of lawbreakers. The hateful, radical activism promoted by many of these employees is divisive and antithetical to the founding principles of our nation. We’re always excited when law enforcement agencies at the state or federal levels take action based on our journalism but we rarely communicate with them.”

A similar undercover video recorded inside a Texas A&M classroom last fall targeted Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in English, who taught a course on children’s literature. The video was recorded during a September session on gender identity and expression, when a student interrupted McCoul’s lecture and said that she wasn’t “entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.” The student appeared to be referring to a January 2025 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” She also said that the lecture contradicted her own religious beliefs. The secret recording was amplified on X by Texas state representative Brian Harrison, who helped it go viral and called for McCoul’s firing.

Texas Scorecard, a local outlet run by the nonprofit Citizens News Guild, covered the story extensively. CNG’s chairman is Timothy Dunn, a Texas oil-and-gas magnate who has donated heavily to conservative and family values causes, as well as to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Ultimately, McCoul, two Texas A&M staff, and the university’s president—a retired four-star Air Force general—would lose their jobs over the video. In February, McCoul sued the school and several administrators for wrongful termination, accusing them of violating her academic freedom. “The subject matter that the student, and then the university, found problematic was germane to her lesson, consistent with the syllabus, the course description and the catalog description,” her lawyer wrote in a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

The Texas A&M saga depicted a “worst-case scenario” that is playing out over and over, FIRE’s Greenberg said. “Those groups contact the university or create a big media firestorm calling for the professors to be punished and terminated for their research. And universities do that. They take the bait, they accede to the pressure, they cave to the mob, and they punish their professors.”

Since 2000, nearly seventeen hundred scholars have faced sanctions for their speech. Of that number, according to a FIRE report released last October, about three hundred were terminated or forced to resign. The American Association of University Professors has offered recommendations to schools on how best to respond to FOIA requests. Its primary suggestion is that university legal counsel and faculty should work together to determine what they do and don’t need to release under FOIA law. “It has become really clear that this isn’t just a citizen who is interested in what’s going on in my class, right? These are partisan hacks who want to score political points by misrepresenting what takes place in my class,” Kamola said. “I think the institutions have an obligation to defend their faculty from that partisan interference.”

Universities can push back against requests, but they may be unwilling to engage in legal battles. “A lot of schools are saying, ‘We’re just going to keep our heads down and hope that we don’t get noticed, and we’ll just ride this one out,’” Kamola said. “It’s a bad strategy. It’s a losing strategy.”

Reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that since 2023, nineteen states have passed laws that prohibit colleges from having DEI offices, ban mandatory diversity training, forbid universities from using diversity statements in hiring or promotion, or block colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions and employment. A study by PEN America this year found that thirty-eight universities have been proposed for suspension from federal research partnerships over DEI hiring practices. In 2009, Texas became the first state to implement legislation mandating that college syllabuses be shared publicly; since 2024, Utah, Indiana, and Ohio have passed similar laws. University systems in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida have also implemented requirements for syllabuses to be made public.

The Oversight Project is on track to expand its public records campaign. It plans to send FOIA requests to all public universities, seeking any syllabuses that mention DEI policies, as well as university data on their Chinese students, as part of the organization’s “fifty-state solution,” Howell told Tow. He said he couldn’t say how many FOIA responses the organization has received so far, but that it intends to publish them “as soon as practical,” adding: “It’s not imminent. We don’t know what we got yet.” He said the Oversight Project also plans to fundraise for future legal battles. “I think there’s going to be a lot of patriots across the country and foundations that want to support such efforts,” Howell said. “It could be in the tens of millions if all goes well.”

In December, the UNC system announced that instead of rejecting FOIA requests for syllabuses on the basis that they constitute intellectual property, it would now consider syllabuses “directed works,” making them subject to FOIA. It was a total reversal. The president of the UNC system, Peter Hans, said the new policy aims to “promote transparency amid scrutiny.”

A month later, the UNC public records office reopened the Oversight Project’s previously denied request seeking any syllabus that contained DEI-related terms, including “critical race theory” and “microaggressions.” The school notified the relevant professors that their syllabuses were being relinquished.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

How An 1876 Massacre Of Black Men In South Carolina Turned Racial Terror Into Political Power

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:40:34 +0000

Abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white mobs often justified lynchings as a response to riots, to Black voting and to alleged crimes against white women. Library of Congress/Getty Images

BY JACOB WARE

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF DOMESTIC

TERRORISM, GEORGETOWN UNIERSITY

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, its citizens commemorate a democracy more diverse, free and inclusive than it’s ever been. The path to this milestone was imperfect and paved in blood and suffering. Still, few of the revelers will likely pay heed to the anniversary of another historic event: the 150th anniversary of the July 1876 Hamburg massacre.

The massacre, which took place in Hamburg, South Carolina, began as a dispute between a local Black militia and two white citizens over whether the latter could cross the group’s centennial Fourth of July parade. The militia leader, Doc Adams, was later charged with blocking a public highway.

At his court hearing, Adams was met with a white militia – part of the white supremacist Red Shirts – which then pursued the Black militia on their retreat to their weapons arsenal. After a firefight, the Red Shirts captured several Black militiamen, marched them to a nearby site and executed at least four people.

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Union veteran Daniel Henry Chamberlain, described the event as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.” Yet no one was convicted after the attack. In fact, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders would instead rise to the highest offices in the state.

Corey Rogers, an organizer of the 150th anniversary Hamburg commemoration, recently called this massacre “the seminal event that began to change the trajectory of African Americans.” The repression and inequality that would define the next 100 years of U.S. history, in other words, was born at Hamburg.

As a scholar of domestic terrorism, I study the long history of white supremacist and far-right violence in the U.S. My research shows that the Hamburg massacre was not just characteristic of a broader violent moment, but also that the echoes of such violence ring loudly today.

From Hamburg, across the South

According to one estimate, the 12 years of the Reconstruction era, during which the Union attempted to construct a racially diverse democracy in the wake of the Civil War, saw over 2,000 Black citizens murdered in “racial terror lynchings.” Another estimate, from 1895, more starkly claimed that as many as 53,000 Black Americans had been murdered in the 30 years following the Civil War.

By intimidating Black voters and galvanizing white Democrats who sought to undo the results of the Civil War, this violence served to effectively kill Reconstruction and the tangible promises of Black emancipation.

What happened in Hamburg provides a particularly egregious example of such racial terrorism catapulting political triumph. After that tragedy, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders went on to successful political careers, with two of them becoming U.S. senators – one of whom, Benjamin Tillman, also served as South Carolina governor.

As Jenny Heckel, then a Clemson University graduate student, noted in her 2016 master’s thesis, it was “not in spite of the white Carolinians’ participation in the murder of six black men, but because of it, they won election to political offices.”

In South Carolina’s 1876 gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Confederate veteran Wade Hampton III, emerged triumphant and reinstated white supremacy as the fulcrum of state governance. His name had been put forward by former Confederate major general Matthew Butler, who had represented the two white farmers before the Hamburg attack and who himself went on to serve in the U.S. Senate.

In 1895, South Carolina held a constitutional convention, spearheaded by the aforementioned Hamburg massacre ringleader Tillman, and adopted a new constitution that effectively ended the Black vote in the state.

An enduring threat

In the 1890s, renowned abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white vigilantes offered three justifications for the lynchings of Black Americans: stamping out alleged race riots, protecting the white vote share and protecting white women from alleged sexual crimes by Black men.

The first two were front and center in the Hamburg massacre. In fact, as Heckel reflected a decade ago, “white Carolinians blamed the black militia for starting the riot, and Southern white newspapers created images of riotous blacks to contest black descriptions.”

Since the massacre, racial violence has had a long echo in the United States. And in many cases, the same justifications elucidated by Douglass remain.

Both the Tulsa race massacre and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, for instance, were sparked by false accusations of sexual harassment or assault made against young Black men.

The violence persists today. In June 2015, just 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Hamburg, a white supremacist gunman entered the historically Black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

In May 2022, a white supremacist killed 10 Black Americans at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.

Both gunmen made multiple references to the same conspiracy theories Douglass identified, with the Charleston domestic terrorist going as far as to praise segregation as “a defensive measure” while criticizing the “historical lies, exaggerations and myths” of the historical record of slavery and its aftermath.

Still, there are key differences between the attacks at Charleston and Buffalo and their Reconstruction predecessors. The political violence that tainted the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era clashes with traditional definitions of terrorism, which typically targets a power structure that such violence seeks to upend.

Instead, attacks like the one in Hamburg, which sought to proactively protect the rights and power of white Americans – and which were often endorsed by state and local governments – have more in common with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not only did the scale of the broader violence across the South indicate a campaign to mass-murder an ethnic subgroup for political purposes, but Tillman, perhaps the most infamous of the Hamburg murderers, never denied the attack’s goals.

“We are not sorry for it,” he would proudly recall before the U.S. Senate in 1900. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”

‘A painful duty’

Attempting to commemorate all such anniversaries is an impossible task, simply because of the sheer volume. For example, September marks the 150th anniversary of the Ellenton Riot. In that massacre, Black South Carolinians were systematically hunted throughout their community over an alleged attack on a white elderly woman, which was later proved false. The death toll may have eclipsed 100.

Countless similar incidents have plagued U.S. history.

In my view, to tell the story of America’s founding without referencing these profound scars is akin to deceit, if not complicity. Civil rights leader and journalist Ida B. Wells put it this way in 1895: “It becomes a painful duty … to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.”

Or, as a local retired pastor said of Hamburg commemorations, “We want to keep it burning so people won’t forget what transpired.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Cholera Still Kills Thousands EachYear – In Places Without Clean Water, It’s Far From History

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:22:36 +0000

Cholera is common in parts of the world where clean water sources are unreliable. Sudan has suffered multiple outbreaks since the onset of a civil war in 2023. AFP via Getty Images

BY KATRINE L. WALLACE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF

EPIDEMIOLOGY AND BIOSTATISTICS,

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO

Many Americans have heard about cholera only from “The Oregon Trail,” the retro computer game in which players try to get their 1830s pioneers to the Oregon Territory. If your wagon train comes down with this highly contagious bacterial infection, the pioneers could die from diarrhea and dehydration before they get out of Nebraska.

In the 21st century, the U.S. records fewer than 20 cholera cases per year, nearly all of them in travelers who were infected abroad.

While cholera has nearly disappeared from wealthy countries, it remains one of the world’s deadliest waterborne diseases in places where clean water and basic healthcare are unreliable.

The latest reminder came in the summer of 2026 in Sudan, where a long conflict has devastated hospitals and water systems, allowing cholera to spread rapidly.

As an epidemiology professor, I teach the story of John Snow, the London physician who traced an 1854 cholera outbreak to the contaminated Broad Street public water pump. His work not only helped establish modern epidemiology, it also illustrates a lesson that remains true today: Cholera spreads wherever safe water fails.

A worsening problem

Cholera has surged over the past five years: Reported cases rose about 175%, from 223,370 in 2021, to 614,828 in 2025. In fact, 2025 was the deadliest year for the disease in more than a decade, with almost 7,600 deaths across 33 countries. Over that period, there was an average of about 481,000 cases a year globally.

But the true burden is likely far higher, because many countries with the largest outbreaks lack the laboratory and surveillance systems needed to detect and report every case. The World Health Organization estimates the real figure is closer to 1.3 million to 4 million cases and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths each year.

The global cholera case fatality rate – that is, the proportion of people who die among everyone diagnosed with cholera – was roughly 1.2% in 2025. A 1% case fatality rate is how the WHO measures adequate care.

Those cases and deaths are heavily concentrated: Africa accounted for about 70% of reported cholera deaths in 2025.

Easy to cure but hard to stop

What makes cholera so tragic from an epidemiological perspective is that it is one of the simplest diseases to treat. The bacterium Vibrio cholerae kills through dehydration – the watery diarrhea can drain a person to death within hours.

The remedy is oral rehydration solution, which is a mixture of clean water, sugar and salts. Most patients can recover from cholera with this solution alone. In severe cases, patients need intravenous fluids and antibiotics. In a functioning treatment center, fewer than 1% of the people who get cholera die from this infection, well within the WHO’s global benchmark of adequate care.

The trouble is that the cause and the cure for cholera both come from water. Oral rehydration requires clean water, and cholera thrives where clean water is scarce among the roughly 2 billion people worldwide who still lack safe drinking water.

A problem of inequality

The countries hit hardest tend to share the same vulnerabilities: rapid urban growth that outpaces sanitation, climate-driven floods and droughts that contaminate or dry up safe water sources, and armed conflicts that push people into crowded camps and destroy the water and health systems meant to protect them.

An inexpensive and effective two-dose oral vaccine is also available, and its protection against infection lasts several years. Because demand has outstripped supply for so long, the global stockpile has been rationed in many areas to a single dose per person by the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision – the WHO-led body that manages the global supply. One dose provides enough short-term protection that vaccinating twice as many people during an active outbreak saves more lives than giving two doses to half as many people.

The May 2026 outbreak in Sudan shows how quickly a steady situation can unravel. A vaccination campaign reaching millions of people had only just ended, and the country’s last cholera outbreak was declared over in March 2026. But just two months later another outbreak emerged, causing more than 1,330 confirmed cases and 114 deaths as of July 10.

The WHO reported an initial case fatality rate of 13.7%, reflecting the extent of the country’s collapsed health services and the fact that early surveillance generally captures only patients with the most severe cholera symptoms.

Amid three years of war, the WHO reported in April 2026 that 37% of Sudan’s health facilities were nonfunctional.

Sudan is one instance of a global pattern: In 2024 nearly a quarter of the world’s cholera deaths occurred not in a health facility but in the community – at home, in a camp, on a road – among people who never reached care.

South Sudan’s 2024–25 cholera outbreak illustrates the importance of timely treatment. The case fatality rate was 0.9% among patients treated in health facilities but 1.9% among all patients in the outbreak. Nearly half – 47% – of reported deaths occurred outside of a health facility.

Infrastructure saves lives

These cases of cholera are not inevitable. The WHO and its partners have set a goal of cutting cholera deaths by 90% by 2030. The tools to do it – clean water, rehydration salts, vaccines – are proven and inexpensive. What is missing is the investment to put them where they are needed.

When I describe John Snow and the Broad Street pump to my students, I want them to see cholera not as a solved problem but as an unfinished one. This disease did not retreat because the bacterium weakened or because humanity outsmarted it. It retreated wherever people built the infrastructure and systems to keep water clean and treat the sick. It returns wherever those elements are absent or destroyed.

For many Americans, cholera survives only as a line on a screen in an old game. But for hundreds of millions of others, it is a disease of contaminated water, overwhelmed clinics and preventable deaths.

RDEAD ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Why ‘Democratic Neutrality’ Is An Overlooked Threat To American Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:11:27 +0000

Protesters participate in a ‘We The People 250’ march during 2026 Fourth of July celebrations in Washington. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

BY MATHEW HALL, BRITTANY SOLOMON AND TYLER LEIGH

In recent years, a growing number of elected officials have questioned or outright denied the results of elections, sought to undermine freedom of speech, and attempted to bend electoral rules to benefit themselves.

Only a sliver of Americans say they support these kinds of antidemocratic actions. For example, just 8% of Americans support making it harder for their political opponents to vote.

So how do politicians who espouse antidemocratic views continue to win elections if these policies are so unpopular?

As scholars affiliated with the Rooney Democracy Institute at the University of Notre Dame, we analyzed surveys of over 48,000 Americans conducted by YouGov, NORC at the University of Chicago and Bovitz between September 2022 and July 2025 to try to get an answer.

A key finding emerged: A significant swath of Americans were actually indifferent toward antidemocratic practices.

This is an important distinction. Prior research tended to assume that if a person doesn’t support antidemocratic practices, then they must oppose antidemocratic practices. In other words, if only 8% of the public supports making it harder for political opponents to vote, then roughly 92% of Americans must oppose making it harder for opponents to vote.

However, our research shows that there is actually a big chunk of Americans – at times a proportion as large as 52% of voters – who neither support nor oppose antidemocratic practices. While only a small number of Americans outright support violating core democratic norms, many Americans express no opinion about politicians who undermine democracy.

We call this attitude toward antidemocratic practices “democratic neutrality,” and we believe it’s an overlooked and understudied threat to democracy.

Ambivalence is not the same as opposition

We see democratic neutrality as key to explaining the success of antidemocratic politicians in America.

To illustrate: Only about 1 in 10 Americans agree that politicians should be loyal to their political party over the Constitution. But politicians who flout constitutional norms have won races at all levels of the government.

Dozens of Republicans won 2026 primary elections despite continuing to reject the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The group includes Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who asked the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the certified election results in four states won by Joe Biden. In May 2026, Paxton defeated incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn to become the party’s nominee.

We show that this apparent contradiction has a straightforward explanation.

Around 25% of the public expresses neutrality when asked whether politicians should be more loyal to their party or the Constitution. When those who prioritize their party over the Constitution and those who are neutral toward the idea are considered together, more than one-third of Americans are open to voting for a politician who prioritizes partisan, rather than constitutional, loyalty.

One-third of the population is more than enough to win a partisan primary. And given the deeply polarized political climate and declining electoral competition in the U.S. – including increases in gerrymandered legislative districts – winning a partisan primary is often tantamount to electoral victory.

The prevalence of democratic neutrality is troubling because in survey experiments with hypothetical candidates, most Americans who express neutrality toward antidemocratic policies vote the same way as the small number of Americans who outright support antidemocratic policies.

We were also able to show that when candidates for elected office take antidemocratic stances, only Americans who explicitly oppose antidemocratic practices punish those candidates at the ballot box. Americans who are neutral toward or supportive of antidemocratic practices do not.

When we accounted for neutrality across multiple antidemocratic practices, from political violence to voter suppression, the picture became even more dire. Nearly two-thirds of Americans express neutrality or support for some form of antidemocratic practice.

In other words, a clear majority of the public is willing to tolerate a politician who undermines core aspects of American democracy.

Neutrality is not a passive stance

Using what’s called regression analysis, we were able to dig deeper into the behaviors and attitudes associated with democratic neutrality. We found that democratic neutrality appears to be tied to a variety of factors.

Some Americans appear willing to tolerate politicians undermining democracy if it means those politicians enact policies they support. Others seem ambivalent about democracy, indifferent to the issue or unsure what qualifies as an antidemocratic policy. And consistent with prior research, some people may actually support antidemocratic policies but express neutrality because of social pressure.

Regardless of why Americans express neutrality, those who do so are just as likely to vote for authoritarian politicians as the relatively small number of Americans who explicitly support undemocratic practices in some form.

Our research indicates that fringe extremists and the few politicians who actively promote authoritarian ideas are not solely to blame for America’s democratic troubles.

The millions of Americans who simply remain neutral when democracy is threatened are a greater threat to the country’s system of government. These democratically neutral voters are, in our view, complicit in the continued erosion of democratic norms in the U.S, even if they do not openly express support for antidemocratic policies.

Indeed, our research indicates that neutrality is not a passive stance. Preventing further democratic erosion requires voters to reject candidates who undermine basic democratic principles, even – and especially – if they are candidates from one’s own party. As former President Theodore Roosevelt warned, “… to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.”

READ ORIGIAL STORY HERE

Better Parenting Starts With Knowing What Works. We Tested A Project In 8 African Countries

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:04:00 +0000

BY INGE VALLANCE AND GENEVIEVE HAUPT RONNIE

Raising adolescents can be difficult under the best of circumstances. On top of that, some families are also dealing with poverty, unemployment, conflict, displacement, illness and climate shocks. In these conditions, caregivers may receive very little support themselves.

Governments and NGOs are increasingly using parenting support programmes as part of efforts to reduce violence against children and improve adolescent wellbeing. These programmes help caregivers and adolescents strengthen relationships, communicate better, solve problems together and manage conflict. They are typically delivered in small groups over several weekly sessions by trained facilitators.

Many parenting programmes are first tested in rigorous studies. Families are randomly assigned to receive the programme or to a comparison group. This is a way of finding out whether a programme is the real cause of improvements. The trials usually take place under carefully managed conditions.

As researchers who study parenting programmes, we wanted to answer an important question: can a parenting programme that works in a carefully controlled trial still benefit families when it is delivered at scale through routine government and NGO services?

Our recent research examined this question across eight African countries.

Our findings

Rather than running a new experiment, we analysed data collected as part of large-scale programme delivery. We brought together information from more than 120,000 adolescents and caregivers across the eight countries. We also examined how families’ experiences changed after they took part in a programme. Existing government and NGO services in Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe delivered the programmes. These countries provided a variety of settings.

We found consistent associations with improvements in parenting, mental health and violence prevention. Across the eight countries, caregivers and adolescents reported lower levels of physical and emotional violence after taking part in the programme. We also found improvements in parenting practices, including more positive involvement and better supervision of adolescents. Caregivers reported lower parenting stress and fewer depressive symptoms. Also, adolescents reported improvements in depressive symptoms and behavioural problems.

Finding that programmes can make a difference under real-world conditions is important because interventions that work well in research studies often become less effective when expanded into routine service delivery.

Parenting support programmes

Parenting support programmes vary, but many share a similar approach. “Evidence-based” programmes have been rigorously evaluated and shown through research to improve outcomes for children and families.

They are practical, skills-based programmes. They help caregivers and adolescents communicate better, manage conflict at home and reduce harsh punishment. They also build more supportive relationships. Sessions may include role-play, problem-solving activities, or discussions about handling stress, peer pressure or family finances.

Importantly, these programmes are not about “perfect parenting”, nor are they about blaming caregivers. Many families are parenting under extremely difficult conditions with very limited support.

The programme we studied, Parenting for Lifelong Health for Teens, was developed with the World Health Organization and Unicef. It was first tested in South Africa before government and NGO services took it up in several African countries. It has also been delivered in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Why scaling up is difficult

Expanding programmes sometimes means delivering them with fewer resources, less supervision or more interruptions. Staff may have varying levels of training and support. In humanitarian settings, conflict, disease outbreaks or climate disasters may disrupt delivery.

That is why we wanted to understand whether parenting programmes could still be useful when delivered in real-world conditions.

The programmes in our study were delivered in very different contexts. Some took place in areas affected by conflict and displacement, including parts of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Others were delivered during COVID-19 lockdowns. In Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, delivery moved to phone and WhatsApp. Limited internet connectivity and access to data often hampered this.

The study focused mainly on adolescent girls and their caregivers because many of the wider service programmes were designed to support girls facing risks linked to violence, HIV and social vulnerability.

What we found

Overall, physical abuse scores were around two-thirds lower after programme participation, although the extent of change varied between countries and contexts. We saw positive changes across this wide range of settings, from conflict-affected communities to pandemic situations.

Emotional abuse and approval of corporal punishment also declined across countries.

We saw similar patterns in reports from both caregivers and adolescents. This matters because it suggests the findings were not limited to one group reporting more positively after participating.

We also found substantial differences between countries in baseline levels of violence, mental health distress and family stress. This is important because there is no single “African context”, and programmes need to work across very different social and economic realities.

Why this matters

In many African countries violence prevention, mental health and family support tend to be treated as separate areas of policy and practice. But everyday family relationships connect them. Parenting support is gaining recognition as one way to prevent violence.

Our findings suggest that helping caregivers and adolescents build more supportive relationships can improve wellbeing and safety.

There are limitations to our study. We cannot conclude that the programme was the only cause of improvements. But the consistency of the findings across countries, organisations and participant groups suggests that evidence-based parenting programmes can be helpful when delivered at scale in challenging conditions.

In recent years, governments globally have made commitments to preventing violence against children. That is only the first step. Governments also need approaches that are practical, scalable and realistic to deliver through routine systems. Our findings suggest that evidence-based parenting support can be one of these approaches.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Nigeria’s Conflict Zones: Why People Stay Even When They Can Leave

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:19:44 +0000

Benue, in Nigeria’s north central region. Photo by Ufoma Ojo on Unsplash

BY EZENWA E. OLUMBA

LEVERHULME EARLY CAREER RESEARCH

FELLOW, ASTON UNIERSITY

When armed groups attack a community, people often assume that everyone who can escape will leave. This belief influences news stories, public discussions and humanitarian efforts, which usually focus on those who have been forced to move.

However, while I was doing research in north-central Nigeria, also called the Middle Belt, I came across some communities that had the means to flee to safety but decided to remain, even though they faced repeated violent attacks from armed nomadic herders and got little or no help from the government.

I have been studying why people move or stay, and the violent conflicts between farming communities and nomadic herders in the Middle Belt, since 2018. I have published several studies on these issues. My research examines the history of the conflicts, what causes them to escalate, and why some people choose to remain in conflict zones. I have also studied how memories of people, places and past experiences influence decisions to remain.

In one study, my co-authors and I use the term eco-violence to describe conflicts over land and water between farming communities and nomadic herders across the dry Sahel region. These conflicts are driven partly by pressures on land and water, discrimination, and failures of government, as herders move with their livestock in search of grazing and water.

Studies show that in many crisis situations, more people stay than leave. To better understand migration and conflict, we need to ask not just why people run away, but also why some remain.

One reason is that they fear losing their ancestral land and traditional way of life.
The study

In Nigeria’s Middle Belt, communities have faced violence and the loss of homes, farms and food stores for many years.

Thousands of people are killed every year, with many communities destroyed and others deserted. According to Amnesty International, over 6,896 people were killed between May 2023 and May 2025 in Benue state alone.

These rural communities receive little or no protection from the police or military. Sometimes, attackers even warn the communities ahead of time, but the police or military still do not step in to protect them.

Hardly a week that goes without a killing in Benue, Plateau or Nasarawa states in Nigeria.

In 2022, I spoke with 54 people living in Benue and Nasarawa states. In Benue, I spoke with people who were indigenous to the location, as well as people who had fled to nearby communities. In Nasarawa State, I spoke with members of a community who had been displaced but later returned after regaining control of their village.

Why ancestral land matters

Their two main reasons for staying emerged from the research, which has since been published in Mobilities.

The first was their attachment to their ancestral land and the resources it provides. Many people in the Middle Belt are farmers who cultivate land inherited through generations. The same land contains their family homes, burial grounds and sacred sites, and provides the setting for rituals and traditional festivals.

The Middle Belt is known for its fertile land. Benue State, for instance, is often described as the country’s “food basket” because much of the food grown there is supplied to other parts of Nigeria.

The second was their desire to preserve a familiar way of life that makes living meaningful to them. For these communities, home is made up of relationships, memories, traditions and identities passed from one generation to the next. Some of them put it simply: they would rather die than leave.

One of the community members said this:

This land is where I was born, and this is my father’s land. Wherever I run to, I will become a stranger and may become destitute … If I die in my house for what belongs to me, let me die. This is why I did not flee.

Their decision is not simply about whether they could survive elsewhere. It is mostly about preserving their traditional way of life, since life away from their ancestral land may no longer feel meaningful.

These communities believe they can only keep their way of life by staying on what they call their “father’s land”. Leaving would mean surrendering their land, livelihoods and communal life to live elsewhere with little or nothing.

One of the community members said:

Another factor is that the area where we are settled now belongs to our forefathers, and if we flee and abandon this place, where are we heading to? … [S]ince this is our land, we must live on it.

Remaining does not mean that they prefer violence. They know the dangers and fear further attacks. Many have lost relatives and friends. But leaving would mean losing a way of life they believe they cannot rebuild anywhere else.

Conflict is not the only thing people fear

Understanding this can help scholars, policymakers, journalists and humanitarian groups to work more thoughtfully with people who choose to remain in conflict, for whom leaving may carry losses they consider impossible to replace.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Nigeria’s Federal Police Force Has Failed, But What Does History Say About Local Forces?

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:30:56 +0000

The Dogarai police system was reformed in 1907 to become the Native Authority Police Force. Wikimedia Commons

BY SAHEED BALOGUN AMUSA

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, OBAFEMI

AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY

The Nigerian Senate passed a bill on 24 June 2026 establishing state police in the 36 states of the country. The passage of the executive bill, sent to the National Assembly by President Bola Tinubu, officially opens the way to dismantle the decades-old structure of the Nigeria Police Force and replace it with a dual model, comprising the Federal Police Service and State Police Services. Saheed Balogun Amusa, a police historian, explains that Nigeria had regional police before a central police force. He sets out what went wrong with those formations and the lessons they offer.

What was Nigeria’s regional policing system?

Nigeria used to have a federal Nigeria Police Force, established in 1930, a Native Authority Police Force in the northern region and a Local Government Police Force in the western region.

Only the eastern region did not have a regional police force, most likely because pre-colonial Igboland and other communities in the area did not have a policing system. In northern Nigeria, the pre-colonial Dogarai police system was reformed in 1907 to become the Native Authority Police Force. In western Nigeria, various police systems in Yorubaland were reformed into the Local Government Police Force during the colonial era.

These regional forces were controlled and funded by the regional governments. They were abolished in 1968 and their personnel recruited to the Nigeria Police Force. While regional police then were closer to the citizens, hence effective, they were also susceptible to control and influence by the ruling political elites.

Your research showed that the federal police were not insulated from political influence during the 1962 Action Group crisis. Are federal police good for Nigeria?

Whether federal or state police, they are agents of governments that control and fund them. However, operating a single police system in Nigeria gave the federal government the power to undermine the powers of state governors who should be the chief security officers of their states. It also reduced the effectiveness of the police in local environments.

In my view as a police historian, federal police are instruments of political attainment and consolidation. They are used, in some instances, to gain and keep political power. They are also instruments of political harassment and intimidation of the state and local governments.

The 1962 Action Group crisis was a result of ideological conflicts among the leaders of Action Group, the ruling party in the western region from the 1950s to 1965. The 1962 riot within the chamber and premises of the western region House of Assembly in Ibadan led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the region from May 1962 to January 1963. The supporters of Obafemi Awolowo, then federal opposition leader, accused the federal police of protecting the interests of the Akintola-led government. They also alleged that the prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, denied them police protection.

Other instances include the role of the Nigeria Police Force in the 1953 Kano riots, the 1959 federal elections and the recurring Tiv riots of the 1960s. The 1965 western regional elections and the 1983 general elections were others. The federal government in these instances used the police to suppress the citizens.

To give some more recent examples: A former governor of Anambra State, Chris Ngige, was abducted by policemen led by an assistant inspector-general, Raphael Ngige, in July 2003. The then inspector-general, Tafa Balogun, later ordered his release. Similarly in 2013, during a feud between Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi and then president Goodluck Jonathan, Amaechi and his entourage were teargassed and physically blocked from entering the Government House in Port Harcourt by federal police. In 2023, heavily armed police officers fired teargas and water cannons at Governor Siminalayi Fubara outside the Rivers State House of Assembly complex.

How could state police in Nigeria succeed, in your view?

Political influence cannot be ruled out in any government institution. Globally, there have been accusations of political manipulations of police and other security agencies at all levels. However, this does not mean that police everywhere are agents or instruments of political intimidation.

A country like Nigeria that is trying to experiment with state policing after several years of a single police system needs to put certain measures in place to ensure the dual policing structure is successful. These include constitutional frameworks, recruitment, training, equipping and remuneration. The state police must be properly engineered towards people-orientated policing.

The Police Council which advises the president on the appointment of the inspector general of police and Police Service Commission which is responsible for the appointment, promotion, discipline, and dismissal of all police officers must be legally and practically autonomous.

There must also be financial and operational independence of the state police and strict adherence to professionalism by the force.

Every reform comes with initial challenges. The governments must be ready to abide by the principle of true federalism. Citizens too must be alive to their civic responsibilities, duties and obligations. Otherwise state police will not be successful and it won’t be long before people will begin to clamour for its abolition.

Based on your research, do you think the current conditions in Nigeria are suitable for introducing state police?

The current security situation in Nigeria calls for establishment of state police. It is long overdue.

Nigeria is the only federal state in the world that has a single police system. The United States has county police, state and federal police. The French have Police Municipale, and the Chinese Chengguan. These are equivalent to city police forces.

State police will solve many security challenges in Nigeria but create new ones too, like potential political abuse and jurisdictional issues with the federal police. The country is federal in name but unitary in practice.

The socio-economic and political challenges like terrorism and banditry confronting the country will also be a major problem.

It is hoped that state police in Nigeria will be sustainable in the long run if there is strong political will from the government and greater commitment from the citizenry.

READ ORGINAL STORY HERE

The Gambia’s Hidden History: How A Tiny River Basin Influenced Colonial Trade And Slavery

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:47:11 +0000

A mural at a slave house on Janjanbureh Island, once known as Georgetown, in The Gambia. Peter van der Sluijs/Wikimedia Commons

BY PAPA CHERIF BERTRAND BASSENE

SENIOR LECTURER, UNIVERSITE

CHEIKH ANTA DIOP DE DAKAR

The Gambia is often portrayed as little more than a geographical oddity, a strip of land engulfed by its much larger neighbour Senegal. It was once the centre of Senegambia, administered by Britain between 1765 and 1779. But there is another way of looking at it which reveals its importance and adds to current reflections on reparations for slavery.

Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassène has studied the history of The Gambia and southern Senegal. He argues that British and Portuguese sources point to the existence of “Sierragambia” – a dynamic Mande-Atlantic connection and maritime corridor extending from the Gambia River basin, through the Casamance and Cacheu networks, down to the Sierra Leone River estuary, which later became the Abolitionist Laboratory Loop.

This independent coastal region played a decisive role in the Atlantic’s political, commercial and anti-slavery dynamics. Here, French-British rivalries intersected with African political agency long before the abolition of the slave trade. Whether through strategic alliances or fierce resistance, Bassène argues, African societies played an active, structuring role in transforming the Atlantic system into a network of exchange. We asked him to fill in the details.

How did you go about your research?

My research draws on two sets of European archives: British archives on The Gambia, and Portuguese sources on The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. I analysed them alongside the historiography of Senegambia rather than in isolation.

Rather than treating these records as objective accounts, I approached them as geopolitical narratives. These require critical interpretation, informed by insights from historical linguistics; by analysing Atlantic, Mande, and Bak languages, I trace the etymologies, shifting meanings, and social realities hidden behind European denominations and colonial administrative categories.

These sources help reveal how coastal trading networks developed. They also show how waterways were controlled by “Banhüns” (Baynunks) or “grumetes/gourmets”. Europeans used these terms for the local intermediaries who connected them to the Atlantic slave trade.

The sources show African political structures remained strong and were able to negotiate, resist, or exploit imperial rivalries.

What was the crisis between the French and British colonial forces all about?

Between 1779 and 1785, “Sierragambia” was a space where Franco-British rivalries intersected with African political agency, before the abolition of the slave trade.

In 1779, French forces destroyed Fort James on the Gambia River, ending Britain’s Province of Senegambia. But the French administration could not establish lasting control. British ships quickly returned and resumed their operations.

This rivalry reached its peak in October 1780. The French naval warship Le Sénégal boarded four English vessels at the mouth of the river. Britain responded quickly.

On 2 November 1780, the ship HMS Zephyr, supported by the privateer Polly (a civilian vessel), attacked the French ship. Twelve French sailors were killed and 28 wounded. The British lost only two men. Le Sénégal was captured and taken to Gorée, the slave trading island. It exploded shortly afterwards.

What role did Gambian communities play?

Portuguese sources describe precolonial Casamance in today’s Senegal as a territory fiercely guarded by coastal societies. There was no easy access. Europeans had to pass through the Banhuns-Grumetes, intermediaries from local communities, and Portuguese “lançados” (exiles). These various actors controlled the backwaters, filtered trade flows, and dictated the terms of barter.

The 1780 episode was shaped by an African initiative, a strategic alliance between British sailors and the Joola people of Fogni (the southern part of the Gambia River). Trapped along the river, the British sailors secured logistical and military support from the Joola. Rather than a victory decided purely by British maritime superiority, the capture of the ship Le Sénégal was engineered by a local African alliance that stripped the French of mobility and logistics. Africans created the tactical conditions that made British interception possible.

Coastal communities refused to supply the French. They harassed French rowboats, and disrupted the slave trade. On the north bank, the Niuminkés generally supported France. On the south bank, the Fogni communities allied with Britain. Their actions helped shape the territorial status quo ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Although this treaty kept Albréda north of the river under the French flag, Paris had no real control over the river.

The agreement brought only a temporary pause to the conflict between the French and the British. It continued for decades.

How did this play out in the slave trade?

After losing its American colonies, Britain realigned its economic priorities. As it became an industrial power, it used the abolitionist movement as a tool to weaken its economic rivals. Sierragambia proved fertile ground for this project. Britain had already built strong ties with local communities.

The founding of Bathurst (present day Banjul, the capital of The Gambia) in 1816 should not be seen just as colonialism imposed from the outside. It was, rather, a legal formalisation of a preexisting political autonomy.

The colonial order that took shape in the 19th century grew out of forms of local autonomy that coastal communities had built during the slave trade era.

Even though the Barra Fort on the north bank of the Gambia River served to protect trade routes, the southern region became a space of emancipation, dissent and social change.

Freed captives, coastal communities and local authorities came together to strengthen their room for manoeuvre in the face of European powers. The Gambia developed a political identity distinct from its neighbours.

Further south of Banjul, the French attempted to replicate this model by planning to create a “village of freedom” on the Carabane island.

What does this tell us about reparations?

As debates over the memory of the Atlantic slave trade gather pace, calls for reparations are growing louder.

Yet a crucial part of west African history remains trapped in an outdated framework shaped by the types of sources historians have traditionally used.

The “Sierragambia” concept invites us to rethink borders and territories in west Africa. Borders are not simply lines drawn at European imperial conferences. They are also a result of complex interactions shaped by the Atlantic system, African diplomatic choices, and local power dynamics.

Recognising African agency also changes the way we think about reparations today. It moves us beyond a simple story of powerful oppressors and passive victims. The collapse of the Atlantic slave trade was not decided only in London or Paris. It played out on the ground, driven by local resistance and global economic shifts.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Jobs Abroad Or Jobs In Africa? Why A Focus On Work In Other Countries Shouldn’t Replace Opportunities At Home

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:23:17 +0000

Thousands of African nurses are recruited to work in western countries every year. Wikimedia Commons

BY MICHAEL BOAMPONG, DANIEL ASAMAH AND MELISSA MOUTAAN

African governments are increasingly encouraging young people to work abroad. To address youth unemployment at home, for example, Ghana and Kenya have expanded labour mobility agreements with other countries. These include Spain, Qatar and Caribbean states.

Agreements with Gulf countries have largely focused on construction and service-sector jobs. But newer partnerships with Caribbean countries are targeting skilled professionals like nurses and healthcare workers.

These arrangements can create structured pathways for people to work abroad, often in sectors where labour is in high demand.

Many African countries have large and growing youth populations struggling to get decent jobs. Meanwhile, wealthier economies face ageing populations and labour shortages. Evidence suggests that 71.7% of young adult (25-29) workers in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in “insecure” work. At the same time, countries across Europe and elsewhere need labour in sectors such as care, agriculture and construction. Matching workers to labour shortages abroad appears to offer a practical solution.

But a deeper question emerges. What are the long-term development implications of governments promoting overseas employment as an economic strategy?

We study migration governance and youth aspirations in Ghana. We have examined how governments, international actors and young people understand the role of migration in development. Drawing on documentary analysis, interviews with policymakers and migration stakeholders, and ethnographic research with young people in Ghana, our recent research found that policymakers increasingly adopt an “economic gains” lens. They view migration as a source of remittances, skills and investment. On the other hand, young people’s aspirations to migrate remain rooted in limited opportunities and broader socioeconomic realities.

Our study focused on migration governance rather than labour mobility agreements themselves. However, it raises the question of what happens when seeing migration as an economic resource begins to shape labour mobility policy.

The drivers

In Ghana, remittances account for 6% of the country’s GDP. In 2024, this was about US$4.6 billion. It was far more than foreign direct investment and official development assistance combined that year. Expanding overseas employment is therefore seen as increasing these inflows while easing pressure on domestic labour markets.

One example of the implications concerns the protection of migrant workers.

Recent research from Kenya has shown how governments may encourage overseas employment even when protections for migrant workers remain uneven. This is an important concern, but misses a larger issue.

Broader development trade-offs can receive less attention. Even where labour mobility agreements are relatively well regulated, they may still contribute to structural challenges at home, such as the loss of skilled workers in critical sectors like health and education.

Ghana provides a clear example. The country is already experiencing a significant outflow of health professionals. Records show 500 nurses have left every month in recent years to work abroad. At the same time, health systems at home remain under pressure, with high patient-to-healthcare personnel ratios and limited resources.

This has prompted wider debates about ethical recruitment from countries already facing healthcare workforce shortages. Promoting further migration, even under formal agreements, raises important questions. Can countries sustain essential services while easing the departure of skilled workers? And how do these policies affect long-term investments in human capital?

What happens when migrants return?

Our research also highlights the importance of thinking about migration as a broader development process rather than simply movement across borders. As labour mobility expands, the question of what happens when migrants return is becoming increasingly important. Many migrants eventually return home, bringing skills, experience and financial resources.

Return migration can support entrepreneurship, innovation and local development. But these outcomes are not automatic. The UN World Youth Report on Youth and Migration suggests that returnees often require effective reintegration support and access to economic opportunities to translate the skills and experience acquired abroad into local development gains. Policies such as skills recognition and access to finance can help make this possible.

Rethinking labour mobility

One implication of our research is that migration policies should be embedded within broader development strategies rather than judged only by their immediate economic returns. This does not mean labour mobility should be discouraged. Rather, it should complement (not replace) investments in decent work, skills development and strong public institutions at home. Labour mobility is therefore not inherently negative. When well designed, it can contribute to both individual and national development.

For this to happen, it needs to move beyond a narrow focus on job placement abroad.

First, strategic partnerships between governments, employers, education and training institutions, recruitment agencies and international organisations are essential. This could involve jointly designed training programmes, mutual recognition of qualifications, and agreements where destination countries invest in training skilled workers in origin countries.

Second, reintegration needs to be taken more seriously. Providing access to finance, training and employment opportunities for returnees can help translate migration experiences into local economic development gains.

Third, labour mobility should not replace domestic job creation but complement it. Governments need to continue investing in sectors that can offer young people decent work at home, rather than relying on migration as the primary solution to youth unemployment or underemployment.

The key question is how migration fits into a broader development strategy.

Labour mobility can create opportunities for individuals and families. But it cannot substitute for long-term investments in decent work, education and economic transformation at home.

If treated simply as a short-term solution to unemployment, labour mobility risks deepening inequalities and weakening already fragile systems. When embedded in a broader development strategy, it can contribute to more inclusive and sustainable growth.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Ugandan Women Work In The Middle East Even Though They Face Abuse. They Told Us Why

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:59:36 +0000

Migrant work, inside and outside Uganda, is one of the many things people do to cope with dire economic situations. Unsplash

BY HANNE O. MOGENSEN AND JULIANA A. OBIKA

Labour migration from Uganda to the Middle East has surged since the early 2000s, with many young women travelling for employment as domestic workers. Most of these jobs are in Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

However, researchers, journalists and organisations like Human Rights Watch and the International Labour Organisation have documented the widespread abuse and exploitation of Ugandan migrant domestic workers by their employers.

Cases include physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and restrictions on movement. Collectively, these accounts point to conditions that have been described as “modern slavery”.

The Ugandan government has attempted to regulate recruitment agencies and negotiate bilateral agreements on working conditions. It’s had limited success.

Networks of authorised and unauthorised recruitment agencies, and rows of posters in Kampala, continue to lure women with promises of well-paid domestic work in the Middle East. This is despite reports of exploitation surfacing regularly in Ugandan media.

Governments and organisations should protect the rights of migrant domestic workers. But it’s equally important to recognise these women as active agents, not just victims.

We are social scientists who research changing gender relations in Uganda. In a recent paper, we studied women’s decisions to migrate to the Middle East for domestic work. We wanted to understand why so many do so even though they are aware of the risks.

Between 2018 and 2022, we interviewed a group of Ugandan women who had worked in the Middle East. We use the term “Middle East” broadly because our focus was on the women’s experiences rather than the differences between the countries where they worked.

We were interested in why they’d migrated and how their experiences abroad affected their lives back home.

Their stories revealed striking contradictions. They spoke of slavery, humiliation and confinement, but also about “becoming somebody” through migrant domestic work.

This points to the reforms needed to improve working conditions abroad and expand opportunities at home.

Gender shifts

In countries where a majority of the population depends on the informal sector or subsistence agriculture, migrant work offers unmarried women, in particular, a rare opportunity to earn an income.

In Uganda, family identity and social status are traced through the father. Marriage has traditionally been formalised through the payment of bridewealth by the man’s family to the woman’s family.

Formalised marriage has become less common in recent decades, however. In the 1995 census, 64% of Ugandan women aged 15-49 described themselves as “married”, while 9% said they were “co-habiting”. By 2016, only 30% of women considered themselves married, while 30% were co-habiting.

The Uganda Bureau of Statistics stopped distinguishing between marriage and cohabitation in 2022. But close to 40% of the population considers itself neither married nor cohabiting.

During our fieldwork, we found that men are finding it increasingly difficult to pay bridewealth. As a result, many women spend their adult lives in a blend of partnerships; men go in and out of their lives while they remain with their children.

Women in our study linked their decision to migrate to the Middle East to men’s failure to live up to the ideal of being providers. They saw migration as a way to gain control over resources rather than waiting for a relationship to be formalised with a man who would then provide for them.

As one of our respondents stated:

First find yourself some money – marriage will always be there.

The women saw themselves as people who had taken their future into their own hands.

They readily acknowledged the harsh realities of the work. Many spoke of losing their freedom and encountering degrading attitudes towards women and, at times, racism. Yet, as one woman put it:

First get yourself the Arab experience then maybe you will become the lucky one who manages to move on to something else.

They hoped migrant work would be the first step towards a new life. And for some women in our study it did happen. They got better jobs in other countries.

Many however, did not. They returned several times to the Middle East before eventually settling down in Uganda.

Some returned home with savings, which they couldn’t do on a Ugandan wage. Earnings in the Middle East vary widely, so getting precise amounts proved difficult. And at home, they faced competing demands, like sharing resources with relatives and trying to build a permanent home of their own.

Even though many women never marry, motherhood remains a powerful social expectation. One in three Ugandan households are headed by women, according to the 2022 demographic survey. We found that even more women are actually heads of households even if a man is around some of the time.

Ugandans may say that a woman is “fathering a home” in the sense that she is building a house for herself and her children, making decisions and controlling resources. Not everybody succeeds in doing so, even after years in the Middle East. But some do. And the hope is there.

Power dynamics of migration

Recruitment agencies and other intermediaries profit from those hopes. The women’s “Arab bosses” may make possible the lives they aspire to build, while sustaining exploitative and oppressive labour relationships.

These experiences are shaped by wider global inequalities.

European countries are part of this unequal system. They restrict opportunities for low-wage migrants through tightening immigration policies. In doing so, they reinforce inequalities in who can move, where they can work and under what conditions.

The women in our study didn’t describe themselves as trying to challenge global inequalities or transform existing power structures. Rather, they sought greater control over resources and decision-making within their families and communities.

Their main motivation was to provide for their families. Yet they are also reshaping power and gender relations in Uganda and beyond.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

THERE WAS A WARRIOR CALLED OJUKWU

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:56:48 +0000

BY UZOR MAXIM UZOATU

He did not deliver on his promise to write “The Book” before his death.

The fact that Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu did not publish a book on the Nigeria-Biafra War leaves a very large hole in whatever passes for Nigerian history.

“Victors write history, and the Biafrans lost,” Frederick Forsyth writes in his controversial book The Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story.

In the absence of a book by Ojukwu on the war, a lot of actors make all kinds of claims in their narratives.

For instance, there is this viral account of Prof Sam Aluko claiming that Biafra was declared before the Aburi conference in Ghana, an obvious lie.

It helps to somewhat right some of the wrongs that there is the 373-page book General of the People’s Army, compiled and edited by Chuks Iloegbunam, and published by Press Alliance Network Limited, Lagos in 2012.

Iloegbunam understands that Ojukwu was akin to a big masquerade that cannot be fully appreciated whist standing on one spot, whence this take from the blurb: “Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu was a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Because individual effort is incapable of adequately interpreting the legend, an amalgamation of local and international voices has assembled a composite pronouncement on the man who declared the Republic of Biafra. Given the centrality of Ojukwu in the history of Nigeria, General of the People’s Army is at once the story of a courageous soldier, a record of the African continent’s bloodiest attempt at secession and a statement on the texture of relations between former Biafrans and the rest of their countrymen and women.”

Although the book is divided into the six broad chapters or sections, it can be read quite seamlessly.
The inclusion of the epochal “Ahiara Declaration” in General of the People’s Army is akin to embedding a book in another book.

Dedicated “to the cause of a negotiated Nigeria”, General of the People’s Army kicks off with a robust preface from Iloegbunam thusly: “There are many like Ojukwu in the Igbo country – including Chinua Achebe, and Mbonu Ojike who died in his prime. They are the true measure of the Igbo spirit which Ojukwu exemplified in 1966. Today, people will be hard put to find sterling characters like them. Today, the dangling of an oil block or the waving of a fat dollar denominated cheque or a ministerial appointment would send many a pretender to Igbo leadership into swearing that the anti-Igbo pogrom of 1966 had not taken place. It is eternally to Ojukwu’s credit that he never posted his conscience, nor was he ever enticed by filthy lucre; he continued to the very end with the insistence that no ethnic group deserved to be cannon fodder in the Nigerian polity; no Nigerian deserved to be a second-class citizen in his own country.”

Saturday, November 26, 2011 was the red-letter day on which Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu passed on in London.

Governor Peter Obi of Ojukwu’s home state Anambra, in his lament, written in Igbo, mourns that “lightning and thunderbolt are silenced.”

Chinua Achebe celebrates the giant who lived for others.

For President Goodluck Jonathan, “Ojukwu’s place in Nigerian history remains assured.”

Senate President David Mark celebrates Ojukwu’s “metamorphosis from military leadership to a true democrat.”

For Senator Uche Chukwumerije, Ojukwu was “the man who saw tomorrow.”

Brigadier-General Samuel Ogbemudia who fought against Ojukwu in the war stresses that “Biafra would have been the toast of Africa” if it had succeeded.

Professor Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe sees Ojukwu as one of the greatest Igbo of all time whose death should lead to the goals of doing justice to the Igbo genocide and the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.
General Olusegun Obasanjo sees Ojukwu’s death as the end of an era.

General Ibrahim Babangida argues that Ojukwu’s understanding of the political dynamics of Nigeria was extraordinary.

Ojukwu was indeed a global phenomenon as showcased by the obituaries of The Economist, Associated Press, Time World, Washington Post, The Guardian of London etc.

The Nigerian newspapers counted too with their editorials.

The many dimensions of Ojukwu are showcased by ex-soldiers, intellectuals, columnists, deans and dons etc.

With the space available to me it is well-nigh impossible going into details as per each contribution.
It suffices that Wole Olaoye, for instance, reveals that Ojukwu bears the English name Christopher.
Is’haq Modibbo Kawu supplies the dimension that they were trained during the war to curse Ojukwu with passages from the Koran.

Of course there are the exclusive vistas of Ojukwu’s life in exile and the arrangement of his pardon and return supplied by his aide, the inimitable Kanayo Esinulo.

Iloegbunam’s General of the People’s Army comes with a good dose of contentious issues like this deposition by Igwe Alex Nwokedi: “When you look at it, while the Hausa were talking about education imbalance, the Igbo, instead of complaining, didn’t but rather they strived to catch up with the Yoruba so much so that today there are more lawyers, doctors and engineers in Igboland than there are in Yorubaland.”

Iloegbunam takes charge to correct errors of fact, like insisting that the Aburi peace talks did not fail but rather Gowon’s Federal Government reneged on the accord.

The errors in the rendering of the Daily Trust editorial are duly pointed out by Iloegbunam.
Prof Aluko’s sequence of events is inaccurate, according to Iloegbunam, because Aburi antedated Biafra’s secession by five months.

Iloegbunam asserts that TY Danjuma did not command a Division during the civil war.
There is no escaping the fact that Ojukwu is a very controversial subject, but then he ended up being the one Nigerian given the greatest burial in the nation’s history.

Given the absence of a book on the war by Ojukwu, Chuks Iloegbunam has done a landmark duty in putting together the many dimensions of the man’s life in General of the People’s Army.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

‘I Promised People I Would Do Something’

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:42:21 +0000

Broadcast Journalist Antonio Sanchez (Facebook)

When Antonio Sánchez lost his job—and Oregon lost its only Spanish news station—he started his own daily YouTube broadcast. The show now reaches tens of thousands.

BY GRACE BENNINGHOFF

Last June, Kenia Jackeline Merlos, her four children, and her sister were at a park in Washington State when they were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. The children and Merlos’s sister spent two weeks in custody, but Merlos was detained for months. At a loss for how to help, her sister contacted an independent journalist, Antonio Sánchez, a reporter who for nearly a decade had been the lead anchor for Univision Portland—the area’s only Spanish-language news outlet—before starting his own broadcast on YouTube. He broke the story of Merlos’s detention and continued to cover her case until she was released.

The story was later picked up by national outlets. “I trusted Antonio to share my story because of his professionalism, his reputation in the community, and the respect he has shown for others in similar situations,” Merlos told me. “He took the time to understand the details, and he kept sharing until I got released. He followed my story until the end.”

Sánchez, who is forty-five, grew up in Calexico, California, near the border with Mexico, where he spoke Spanish at home. His newscast, tailored to the Spanish-speaking community in the Portland area—“Están cayendo como moscas muertas” (They’re dropping like flies), he reported of turnover in President Trump’s cabinet—reaches about fifty thousand people per week and has nearly ten thousand subscribers. His reports cover everything from local politics to crime to weather, broadcast from a basement in Southeast Portland. Acoustic foam is checkered across the ceiling, turquoise carpet covers the vinyl flooring, and a television screen behind the desk bears the name of his show: Noticias Noroeste.

Going solo hadn’t been part of his career plans. But in September of 2024, he was laid off from Univision Portland, and the station, KUNP-TV, announced it was severing ties with Univision and transitioning to English-language news and sports coverage. “I started getting all these messages asking what’s going to happen,” he said.

A few weeks later, Trump won the presidential election. The messages kept coming. “They were asking, ‘What’s going to happen to us? A new government is about to take over.’ I felt like maybe I could create something while I look for a job,” Sánchez said.

He ordered a teleprompter, a microphone, and lights on Amazon; soundproofed the basement; and asked a friend to create a logo. Startup costs ran about fifteen hundred bucks. He produced his first broadcast on Inauguration Day. “Even if it looked bad, it was always going to air,” he said, “because I promised people that I would do something.”

Since then, he has dedicated twelve or more hours each day to reporting, producing, and editing. “I want to preserve that tradition of doing everything they watched on television,” he said. Sánchez wears a suit and sits at a desk as he runs through the top stories. But he has made changes, too. “I talk in sayings—that’s very typical in Spanish, and that’s something you don’t do in English news,” he told me. His style also differs from most Spanish-language news in the United States, where Univision and Telemundo operate under the umbrella of an English-language parent company and tend to align with American broadcast standards. “The media in general has a problem with finding real connection with the audience,” Ismael Nafría, an independent journalist and former board vice president of Sembra Media, a nonprofit that supports Spanish-language media, told me. “The language issue is so important if you want to build something authentic and something real.”

Sánchez built trust quickly. Last fall, reporting on ICE arrests around Portland, he drew a record eighty thousand viewers. He also found himself pushing back against misinformation from local social media influencers who had told audiences they’d witnessed ICE raids—which Sánchez’s reporting revealed were actually local drug raids. “I’m almost like their 211,” he said of his relationship with viewers. “The language barrier makes it harder for them to pick up a phone and call a helpline. But they can message me, and I’ll respond quickly.”

Sánchez initially envisioned Noticias Noroeste as temporary—something to fill the gap left by Univision until a larger station resumed local Spanish-language coverage. But then he thought, “I had to keep doing it.” A new channel, Telemundo Portland, started up about six months ago, but its broadcast is anchored out of Kansas City and includes only a two-minute local segment.

Sánchez said he supports his broadcast through advertising. He brings in at least three thousand dollars per month through ads, sometimes more, and funds are paid to him directly. His ads come from Multnomah County, the Tualatin Valley Water District, and the City of Portland, among others; most are PSAs. “I can’t be worried about, ‘Oh my God, my views went down, my views went up.’ I don’t care. I’m not an influencer, I’m a journalist,” he said. Once revenue allows, he hopes to hire interns. Eventually, he said, he’d like to move into a bigger space.

In January, Merlos was invited to celebrate Noticias Noroeste’s first anniversary party. She said she was nervous—she expected a roomful of “fancy people”—but was surprised to find Sánchez had invited other Portlanders who had been detained by ICE. It was a chance to connect with others who understood firsthand what she and her family had been through. “It’s important to get connected,” she told me. “No one else is going to understand your situation.”

Private Matters

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:27:06 +0000

Catherine Herridge

Catherine Herridge, a former Fox News reporter, is being compelled to pay $800 a day until she reveals confidential sources.

BY RIDDHY SETTY

In 2003, Toni Locy, a former reporter for USA Today, published a series of articles about the FBI’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks that left five people dead and seventeen infected. Along the way, she reported on Steven Hatfill, a former Army scientist who was the initial focus of the FBI’s probe. In 2003, Hatfill filed a civil lawsuit under the Privacy Act, a federal law that restricts government agencies from sharing private information about individuals without their consent. As part of his legal efforts, in 2004 he pressed Locy and other journalists to testify and reveal their sources.

In February of 2008, a federal judge held Locy in contempt of court for refusing to do so. Notably, Hatfill had sued not Locy but the federal government, arguing that his reputation had been ruined due to law enforcement officials leaking to the media and linking him to the attacks. By then, Locy was working as a journalism professor at West Virginia University. She was subject to a fine of five hundred dollars for seven days, one thousand dollars for the next seven, and five thousand dollars for the seven days after that. The judge also barred anyone from helping her pay this fine—her students couldn’t even hold a bake sale to fundraise for her.

Cases like Locy’s—those brought by individuals against the government, resulting in journalists being subpoenaed and held in contempt—are unusual. But they haven’t gone away.

In 2017, Catherine Herridge, then a reporter for Fox News, published a story about Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist who was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation. In 2018, Chen, who was never charged, filed a civil lawsuit against the government under the Privacy Act and subpoenaed Herridge to reveal her sources. In 2024, a Washington, DC, district court ordered Herridge, by then an independent journalist, to pay a fine of eight hundred dollars for each day she did not reveal her sources.

As with Locy’s case, Herridge is not a named party in the lawsuit. Her reporting is not in dispute, and she does not currently face the threat of jail time. But the DC court is asking her to reveal her sources in litigation brought against the government for violating the Privacy Act. “In these Privacy Act cases, the plaintiff needs to establish that the government leaker or alleged leaker acted willfully, and so that’s why you can see plaintiffs in these cases, which are ordinary civil cases, going after journalists,” Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said. Complicating Herridge’s case is the fact that documents about the FBI’s investigation of Chen were filed under seal, and all of the appellate arguments about those documents were held in closed court. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has filed a motion to unseal the documents and hearing transcript.

Core to the litigation is the question of whether Herridge should be protected from being compelled to testify through reporter’s privilege. While most states, as well as the District of Columbia, have enacted shield laws protecting a reporter’s right not to reveal their confidential sources, recent attempts to create a federal version have failed. Much of the current case law dates back to Zerilli v. Smith, a 1981 case concerning an investigation into organized crime where the government, without a warrant, had planted a listening device. The resulting logs were sealed, but some of their contents were reported on by the Detroit News. In that case, a DC district court judge and court of appeals found that the reporter did not have to reveal their sources. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge also ruled that a plaintiff must prove that the information they are requesting goes to “the heart of the matter” and that they have exhausted all other reasonable means to get it before a court can compel a reporter to reveal a source—a test that became crucial in subsequent decisions.

Rottman pointed out that if a court considers only these two factors, a judge can almost always find reason to rule against a reporter’s right to protect their sources in privacy cases. “There’s other things that the court could conceivably do to strengthen the privilege,” he told me. “They can test whether the person’s claim would even survive without the information. So, in other words, if there was an independent source for the potential harm to the plaintiff, the court could rightly look at that and say, ‘Well, you’re going to likely lose anyways, and so we’re not going to pierce the privilege.’”

In Herridge’s case, the DC district court judge held that Chen had cleared the bar put forth in the Zerilli test—getting to the heart of the matter and exhausting all other reasonable means to get the information—and ordered Herridge to reveal her sources, holding her in contempt when she refused to do so. In his 2024 decision, Christopher R. Cooper, a judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, stayed the fine until an appeals court ruled on her case; in September of 2025 the appeals court ruled against Herridge.

In June of 2026, after the appeals court declined to rehear the case, it refused to stay the fine Herridge has been ordered to pay while she prepares her next appeal—this time to the Supreme Court. On July 2, the Supreme Court denied her emergency request to stay the fines (while it considered the request, the fines were stayed); notably, Justice Brett Kavanaugh supported granting the application for a stay. “We’re pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision and hope that it will help bring a close to this matter. It follows complete vindication for Dr. Chen in the district and circuit courts,” Andrew C. Phillips, an attorney for Chen, told CJR in an emailed statement.

In Locy’s case, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit—which included Kavanaugh—stayed the fines pending a decision by the court. But the appeals court never wound up making a decision, because Hatfill’s case was settled. This rendered Locy’s contempt issue irrelevant, effectively canceling her fine. Locy had hoped to push the appeals court to make a decision. “They didn’t think there was a need to decide anything,” Locy, who is now a professor of journalism and mass communications at Washington and Lee University, told me. “I wish they had. Because I think I wasn’t going to win on everything, but I think I was going to win on some stuff,” she said. “And it might have helped Catherine.”

Locy told me that, in Privacy Act cases that seek to force journalists to reveal their sources, plaintiffs’ lawyers often appear to be using them as a shortcut: “They want the journalists to do their work for them, and federal judges are allowing these plaintiffs’ attorneys to go after journalists, and in Privacy Act civil lawsuits, which is a cheap, dangerous way for civil litigators who are looking for a payday.”

Though the reporters subpoenaed in Privacy Act cases are not the ones being sued, news organizations have participated in settling these lawsuits alongside the government. In former nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee’s lawsuit against the government, five journalists from publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and ABC were subpoenaed and refused to reveal their sources. These organizations agreed to pay Lee seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars as part of a settlement that the government also participated in to end the contempt-of-court proceedings against their reporters.

While independent reporters are particularly vulnerable in these cases, Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said this is a fight that corporate media organizations may not want to take on either. “When you look at corporate media, you’ve got to wonder if they value the First Amendment at all, given how they’ve capitulated to attacks on the First Amendment lately,” he said. “Certainly, you know corporate outlets can afford to pay eight hundred dollars a day. That’s not a question, but they could also afford to litigate with Donald Trump, and they chose not to.”

Cases like Herridge’s may be relatively rare, Rottman said, “but when they do occur, they’re really consequential for press freedom.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Alcohol, Sex And Violence: A Dangerous Cocktail That Makes Young Women Vulnerable To HIV

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:44:55 +0000

Alcohol consumption is embedded in South African society. Maor Attias/pexels

BY ZOE DUBY AND KATE BERGH

South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with adolescent girls and young women aged 15-24 at the highest risk of getting HIV. HIV prevalence among girls and women in this age group is roughly double that of their male peers.

Research has identified numerous factors that increase vulnerability among women and girls. These include unequal power dynamics in relationships, challenges in negotiating condom use, as well as exposure to violence. Heavy alcohol consumption or binge drinking can amplify these situations, thus increasing HIV vulnerability.

Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks in one sitting. This behaviour is widespread and normalised in many South African communities with 54% of male drinkers and 35% of female drinkers reporting that they binge drink.

As socio-behavioural scientists our interests lie in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, and sociocultural norms and structural barriers to HIV prevention.

Our recent research sought to explore the intersection between alcohol use, HIV risk and HIV acquisition among adolescent girls and young women living in high HIV-burdened communities in South Africa. We used data from the HERStory3 study, an impact evaluation of the My Journey programme. My Journey is a combination HIV prevention intervention that aims to reduce HIV, teenage pregnancy and gender based violence, as well as keep girls in school and improve their access to economic opportunities.

We found that hazardous drinking was common and strongly linked to sexual violence and condomless sex. But it was not directly associated with HIV acquisition in this study. That does not make alcohol irrelevant. It suggests the pathway from drinking to HIV is indirect, layered, and shaped by other social conditions.

Our findings suggest that HIV prevention for adolescent girls and young women cannot focus only on condoms or individual behaviour change. It needs to confront the conditions that make risk possible.
How the study was done

Our team conducted the HERStory3 study, which was an external evaluation of the My Journey programme. The programme has been delivering services in schools, colleges, dedicated safe spaces and mobile clinics since 2016.

Services start with an HIV risk and vulnerability assessment. Then depending on their needs, girls are offered HIV testing, prevention and treatment services as well as pregnancy testing and contraceptives.

The programme is being implemented in 12 sub-districts with a high HIV burden across eight provinces in South Africa.

To evaluate the programme, we conducted a post-intervention household survey in 2024 with 5,025 adolescent girls and young women. The survey was conducted in the 12 intervention sub-districts, and 12 matched sub-districts that didn’t receive the intervention, for comparison. To complement the survey, our study also included in-depth telephonic interviews with 68 young women from seven provinces.

Those interviews were important because they gave girls the chance to tell us their stories, and help to explain two things. First, whether alcohol was associated with risk. Second, how alcohol fitted into girls’ social worlds.

What we found

We tested the relationship between hazardous drinking and specific sexual risk behaviours. Our analysis showed no statistically significant association between alcohol use and HIV status. However, we found it was associated with sexual violence and condomless sex. Hazardous drinking also appeared to be linked to transactional sex. But this relationship was not strong or consistent once the other risk behaviours were considered.

The interviews helped provide a backdrop to why alcohol consumption among women and girls in South Africa is increasing.

In the narratives of the young women we spoke to, alcohol was woven into peer culture, family and community drinking spaces. Girls described engaging in age-disparate and transactional relationships. These commonly end up in situations in which girls obtain alcohol from older men who expect sex in exchange. The interviews showed that alcohol is not just a drink but a social currency that shapes how girls navigate bars and other drinking venues.

In the social context of bars and informal drinking venues, this exchange can blur consent because alcohol may be used to initiate or pressure sexual access. And the power imbalance created by age, money and intoxication makes it harder for girls to insist on condoms or leave safely.

The risk does not end with sexual coercion.

When girls refuse sex after receiving alcohol, they may face anger, intimidation, or physical violence. This shows how alcohol-related exchange can escalate from social interaction into gender-based harm. This pathway helps explain why alcohol use among adolescent girls and young women cannot be separated from transactional sex, coercion and violence in high HIV-burden settings.

The HIV link

The lack of a direct statistical link between hazardous drinking and HIV infection is not surprising once the broader context is considered. HIV acquisition is the result of repeated exposures over time. Our survey measured drinking and HIV acquisition at a single point in time.

If alcohol increases HIV risk gradually through exposure to sexual violence and condomless sex as a result of transactional or age-disparate relationships, that effect may not appear as a simple one-to-one association in cross-sectional data.

The findings from the interviews make that chain of influence more visible. They show how alcohol can weaken bargaining power, place girls and young women in unsafe settings, and make negotiations for condom use harder.

In the interviews, girls described being expected to have sex after men bought them drinks, and that refusal could lead to rape, threats, or physical violence. The interviews also show that alcohol use among adolescent girls and young women is socially embedded rather than purely individual. This is important for interpreting the study findings.

What the findings mean

HIV prevention for this population needs to address the settings in which alcohol is accessed, the gendered power relations that shape sexual decision-making, and the violence that can follow from those relationships.

The findings point to the importance of safer recreational spaces, community-level alcohol harm reduction, and interventions that reduce women’s dependence on transactional exchanges with older men.

There is also a message here for programme design. Multi-component HIV prevention interventions are more likely to work when they are tailored to the social realities of young women’s lives, not just their knowledge of risk.

Future research should follow participants over longer periods, use stronger causal designs where possible, and test whether reducing hazardous drinking also lowers violence and condomless sex over time.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Racism At The World Cup Is An Ugly Reality. How To Understand Where It Comes From

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 03:02:14 +0000

BY CHRISTIAN UNGRUHE

RESEARCH FELLOW,

UNIVERSITY OF PASSAU

No African teams made it past the quarter-finals of the 2026 men’s football World Cup, but their strategic and tactical play left a lasting impression.

The success of African teams doesn’t come out of the blue, it’s the result of a long process. It’s therefore surprising that African football remains underrated and downgraded by experts, often in a manner that reveals their ignorance both to African football and history. At times, their comments have a highly problematic racist tone.

This was the case with former star player Bastian Schweinsteiger, now a longtime commentator for a German TV network. Ahead of a group stage match against Côte d’Ivoire, he was asked what Germany’s team could expect. He responded:

A bit African football, a bit unorthodox, a bit wild … perhaps also not so conditioned by tactics. We must be prepared for it to be unpredictable.

Setting aside the fact that the German team was often the weaker side – both tactically and in terms of style of play – this characterisation is inappropriate and offensive. It’s based on a stereotyped, colonialist view of Africa.

On the one hand, Schweinsteiger faced criticism that his statement was racist.

As Cote d’Ivoire’s manager, Emerse Fae, said:

It is odd he would speak that way. We could call it racist … I can only hope it is a clumsy statement, rather than something going on in his mind.

On the other hand, there were many people on online forums and social media who wondered why Schweinsteiger’s statement was considered racist, as did his broadcaster, ARD.

Schweinsteiger responded weakly to the criticism:

I was talking about football, not people. This is a football analysis – nothing more, nothing less.

I often hear this kind of downplaying when football in Africa and its people are subtly devalued. As an anthropologist, my research focuses on the migration of football players from various parts of Africa and on the forces that have shaped the evolution of African football, especially the modern game. A key focus is on racialisation, othering, and racism experienced by players.

The research shows that African footballers, and Black players more generally, face different forms of racism.

On social media, they frequently encounter open and hostile rejection and insults. A recent example is the offensive post by Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla, after her country’s loss to France. She described Kylian Mbappé as a colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself off as French … resentful, arrogant and ugly.

Players from Africa also face structural disadvantages in the football industry. This is evident in shorter contracts and lower salaries, as well as peripheral playing positions and less consideration for coaching and administrative roles, as various studies show.

After all, they are also constantly confronted with more subtle forms of everyday racism, which manifests itself in their abilities and qualities being devalued. They are often reduced to their physical appearance, their intelligence denied.

Everyday racism is often expressed subtly and white people like Schweinsteiger are often not aware of its racist connotation. Therefore, the question of whether Bastian Schweinsteiger is a racist or not is not the crucial one (he most likely is not).

The key question is rather why these stereotypes are repeatedly expressed in football and why, for many people, they seem to reflect reality rather than appear problematic. To understand this, we need to do justice to Africa’s diversity and further look at the continent’s colonial history.

Colonial stereotypes

For one thing, simplistic statements like Schweinsteiger’s disparage football across an entire continent without making any distinctions. There is just as little such thing as an “African” style of football as there is a “European” one. This does not do justice to a complex reality and it reveals either ignorance or indifference.

Second, describing African football as “unorthodox,” “wild,” and “not characterised by tactics”, perpetuates stereotypes from the colonial era that extend beyond the sport. My study of African footballers in Germany shows how the players are vulnerable to broader, structural vulnerabilities in Europe.

How many view African migrant footballers is grounded in colonial thinking. European colonisation legitimised itself by ranking people. The enlightened European, capable of reflection, and the uneducated African, who must be tamed.

Starting in the 1920s, colonial administrators deliberately used football to subjugate Africans. Sport was used to teach team spirit and rules to the allegedly naïve, raw and perhaps threatening African in order to turn him into a person loyal to the colony.

Openly showing resistance was dangerous. But interestingly, this happened on the football field. Studies outline how some Africans didn’t try to play by the rules. They tried to make feints, dribbles, and tricks – on the one hand to entertain their own people, but also to display defiance.

During the struggle for independence, football was then used by some African countries to foster a sense of national and pan-African unity. After all, colonial borders had been drawn arbitrarily. National football teams were important, but so was the style of play – integrity and technical skill presented an alternative to the colonial image.

Over the years, national playing styles have developed in various ways. They are influenced by cultural values, transnational linkages and the game becoming professionalised. However, the original mix – powerful bodies, skillful dribbling, and a childlike, naïve approach – has become ingrained in European minds.

Slow poison

At first glance, subtle disparaging remarks like Schweinsteiger’s may not seem to be as racist as the open insults and degrading comments seen every day in football and society. But they are hurtful. And because they are firmly embedded in the social knowledge of European countries, they are hard to erase

Rather, they are a creeping poison that, when constantly reproduced, shapes a society’s collective consciousness. As my research has found, such remarks not only disparage football in Africa but also shape the general perception of a continent that is allegedly backward at every level.

To tackle the powerful colonial-era image of an African inferiority, it is important to take action against all forms of racist disparagement in football and beyond, whether they are unintentional, subtle, or explicit.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

KNOCK, KNOCK

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:08:35 +0000

By issuing subpoenas to five Times journalists, the Trump administration reveals its first response to unwanted national security coverage: go after reporters.

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

On Friday evening, federal agents showed up at the homes of multiple New York Times reporters to deliver subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury. Those who received—or may soon receive—subpoenas include Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, according to an email that Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, sent Times staff over the weekend. The journalists had been part of a team investigating security concerns related to Donald Trump’s new Air Force One—a gift from Qatar last year that was quickly refurbished and decorated in the gaudy cream-and-gold that is typical of Trumpist style. The Times decided to immediately go public about the subpoenas, which seek to compel the reporters to testify in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times newsroom lawyer, said in a statement on Friday. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

Since returning to office, Trump has complained about the look of presidential planes. Other countries had newer planes that appeared “bigger and sleeker and sharper” than Air Force One, Trump told Fox News last year, “and it doesn’t look right.” In May of 2025, the US accepted Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner. It was reportedly worth about two hundred million dollars, and was intended to be the president’s official plane until two Boeing aircraft, commissioned in 2018 but repeatedly delayed, were ready. The Qatari plane was retrofitted to become “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said when he unveiled it in a hangar in Maryland last month. “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”

But last Wednesday, Barnes, Lipton, Pager, and Schmitt heard from sources that, as a security precaution, Trump had been forced to switch back to the old Air Force One when leaving a NATO summit in Türkiye. They wrote about concerns that the Qatari plane may not have been outfitted with security improvements, such as a missile defense system, that officials felt were necessary because of renewed threats from Iran. It was a classic public interest story: millions in taxpayer dollars had been spent to refit the plane that carries the commander in chief and a large entourage of officials, staff, and journalists, but was it even equipped with the necessary defensive features? According to the Times’ Michael Grynbaum, a senior official at the FBI requested that the Times hold the article—calling it a matter of national security—and asked to know the sources of the information. (The piece cited “people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.”) The Times refused both requests and hit publish. The article was followed, on Thursday, by another piece that delved more deeply into the specific defensive countermeasures that may have been skipped when refitting the Qatari plane. The reporting made the Times’ front page on Friday and Saturday. Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry,” according to CNN.

The episode fused two phenomena that have long infuriated Trump: being embarrassed on the international stage, and the use of anonymous sources in reporting that does not flatter him or his administration. He instructed Kash Patel, the FBI director, to oversee a leak investigation, the Times reported (quoting more people who spoke “on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions”). Patel was on his way to Chicago but canceled the trip, instead spending eight hours at the White House on Friday. The subpoenas were issued soon after, from the Southern District of New York. They are strikingly uncommon in leak investigations—let alone as the first step in such a probe. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department insisted on Saturday that “reporters are not the targets; those leaking classified information are.”

But the subpoenas must be seen as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to criminalize routine newsgathering practices, especially on topics related to national security. Last month, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas to journalists at the Washington Post, reportedly for a story relating to Venezuela, and the Wall Street Journal, for a story on military action against Iran, but later backed down and withdrew them after the news organizations pushed back. (The filings in those cases are sealed.) In January, the FBI raided the home of Hannah Natanson, a Post reporter, seizing her devices and referring to her reporting materials as “contraband” in a case “virtually without comparison,” as Maddy Crowell wrote for CJR at the time. And Trump has personally sued multiple news organizations for coverage he didn’t like. Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the Times subpoenas as an “extraordinary escalation” in efforts to “threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.”

The latest case is particularly revealing because it tells us that the Trump administration’s first impulse is now to pursue reporters, even before conducting a thorough internal leak investigation. This seems to treat journalists as criminals for legally receiving information, and looks like a cynical excuse to try to comb through their notebooks and ransack their contact lists. If the five Times journalists are forced to appear before a grand jury, they could be asked to reveal their sources—and, as Perry Stein writes in the Post, they could face charges of contempt of court or obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply. “This is not something that should be normal,” Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild-CWA, of which the subpoenaed reporters are members, told me on Sunday. “But when the president attacks journalists every single day, that becomes an unfortunate normalization—and if we ignore it, then we’re doomed.” The “really scary thing,” Schleuss added, is that Trump’s tactics against the press “are filtering down at the state and the county and the city level. You have county sheriffs who will see this and say, ‘This is how we actually prevent reporting about the no-good contracts that we’ve got.’”

The Times has signaled its intention to aggressively fight the subpoenas. “This is a naked attempt to intimidate individual reporters and to prevent the Times and other independent news media from doing important reporting protected by the First Amendment,” Kahn wrote to staff on Saturday. The paper has a very good chance of winning. As I wrote for CJR in April, the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on critical journalism have not gone down well in many courtrooms. Kahn, in his email, pointed out that the “impulsive” subpoenas “used vague pretenses of a threat to national security,” and said that “we expect to prevail.” But he also issued a warning about the impending strain of the subpoenas on the lives and families of the five targeted journalists, who, for however long this takes, will be tangled up in Trump’s sprawling web of litigation.

Other Notable Stories...

By Jem Bartholomew

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner, a Senate candidate from Maine, announced on X that he was suspending his campaign, after Politico published a story in which Jenny Racicot, a woman who dated him, said Platner sexually assaulted her. (He denied the allegations.) Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, wrote about the extraordinarily difficult, sensitive task of reporting on sexual violence. “A story like this asks you to hold two things at once: real sensitivity toward a source who is describing a traumatic experience and real rigor in testing the account,” Jessica Piper, one of the authors of the Politico story, told Morais.In May, Riddhi Setty and I wrote for CJR about how the Trump administration was helping a white, male editor, Bryant Rousseau, sue the New York Times for discrimination; Rousseau is alleging that he was subjected to “unlawful employment practices” when he was not put forward for the role of deputy real estate editor at the paper. Last Friday, the Times said in a court filing that the administration had violated the First and Fifth Amendments with the suit—and called it an act of retaliation for its journalism. The Times asked for the suit to be dismissed. (Rousseau resigned from the company in June, the Times’ Erik Wemple reported.)On Friday, a federal court in Los Angeles ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using force to prevent journalists, legal observers, and members of the public from documenting immigration enforcement operations in the Central District of California. The case, filed in June of last year by plaintiffs including the LA Press Club, the NewsGuild-CWA, and three individual journalists, came after DHS agents used militarized crowd-control weapons against people documenting immigration raids. “No federal agency has the authority to use force to prevent the public from documenting and holding the government accountable for its actions,” Jonathan Markovitz, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement.In the UK, Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, won a major case at the High Court in London on Tuesday against a lineup of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John, and Doreen Lawrence, who became an advocate for police reform after the racially motivated murder of her son Stephen in 1993, and is now a member of the House of Lords. The plaintiffs alleged a pattern of unlawful information gathering by the news organization—following revelations of phone-hacking in the British tabloid press during the aughts—but Justice Matthew Nicklin said they had failed to prove that the Mail engaged in unlawful activity. At a hearing later this month, the claimants could be ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in legal bills. (They are reportedly deciding whether to appeal.)In the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli settlers attacked several journalists, including some from CNN, who were reporting on the one-year anniversary of the killing of Saif Musallet, a Palestinian American who was beaten to death by settlers near the village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah. Soon after the journalists arrived, four people showed up wielding “wooden and metal rods and stones,” according to a CNN write-up. (Israeli police said four suspects were arrested.) Jeremy Diamond, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent, who was present, said that a full report on the attack would air on Monday night. In related news, the Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday urged Israeli authorities to investigate two recent attacks that targeted the entrances of the Tel Aviv offices of two news organizations—Haaretz, a newspaper, and Channel 12, a broadcaster—with concrete blocks or stones. The vandalism, according to CPJ, seemed like attempts “to intimidate journalists and media workers.” And several Iranian journalists said they were denied US visas to cover the World Cup, according to an article in Nieman Reports, which described the refusals as “unprecedented.” The Trump administration’s travel restrictions on several countries represented in the tournament—Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—included an exemption for athletes, staff, and immediate family members, but it did not extend to fans or media workers. For more on the World Cup—now narrowed to four semifinalists: France, Spain, England, and Argentina—see Amos Barshad’s piece for CJR on news outlets bringing politics into their coverage of the tournament, which concludes next Sunday.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Senegal Is On The Brink: The IMF, The World Bank, And The Debt Crisis That Imperils West Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:27:38 +0000

BY HANNAH NRAE ARMSTRONG AND JOHN MCINTIRE

W est Africa is reeling. Over the past five years, coups have racked Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and the juntas now in charge are dismantling the countries’ institutions. Even as they repress their subjects, they are losing territory to emboldened insurgents. And as these insurgent groups become more entrenched in the central Sahel, they are beginning to threaten the coastal states of Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo.

But amid this upheaval, Senegal remains a democracy in which strong institutions mostly govern capably. The country possesses skilled civil servants with track records of transparent, efficient fiscal management. In 2024, Senegal faced a severe political crisis when the outgoing administration resisted leaving power, but an independent Constitutional Council and an engaged civil society prevented an unconstitutional postponement of elections. Senegal is essentially the only major country in Francophone West Africa whose government remains accountable to its citizens; its stability telegraphs to its neighbors that democratic rule is both desirable and achievable.

Now, however, Senegal is grappling with its own existential threat. On a single day in February 2025, the country went from being considered one of Africa’s most stable economies to one of its most vulnerable after the discovery that President Diomaye Faye’s predecessor, Macky Sall, had hidden extensive debt. The country’s debt-to-GDP ratio has since soared from under 75 percent to over 132 percent. Amid a recent fallout between the country’s top two political leaders, Senegal is attempting to negotiate a new program with the International Monetary Fund. Without help, Senegal could default.

A little support in the form of debt relief from the IMF and the World Bank would quickly help restore balance. A punishing debt burden, on the other hand, would sap resources for badly needed public services, infrastructure, and economic development initiatives. Beyond weakening Senegal’s governing capabilities, such an outcome would create new political and security vulnerabilities throughout West Africa at precisely the moment when Russia is trying to exploit disorder to recruit new proxies.

HIDDEN FIGURES

Over the past five years, military regimes seized power in the central Sahel states, Côte d’Ivoire elected an 83-year-old fourth-term president who banned opposition candidates from running, and Togo pushed through constitutional reforms to keep a two-decade-old dynasty in power. But Senegal managed to remain stable and accountable. In 2024, civil society actors and an independent judiciary drew on what the political scientists Ibrahima Fall and Catherine Lena Kelly describe as Senegal’s democratic “muscle memory”—decades of mobilizing to defend checks and balances—to ensure elections proceeded on schedule. A duo of youthful reformers (Faye and the fiery Ousmane Sanko, who now serves as speaker of the National Assembly) defeated Sall’s handpicked candidate in a decisive first-round victory.

And until February 2025, Senegal’s economic outlook was mostly sunny, having enjoyed a strong recovery after the COVID pandemic. In recent decades, Senegal has expanded access to quality public services, closed the gender gap in school enrollment, and significantly reduced infant mortality rates. New hydrocarbon projects were expected to allow for increased government investments in roads, energy, and water.

But when Faye took over from Sall, his government commissioned an independent audit of state finances to establish the extent of Senegal’s public debt amid rumors of anomalies. The audit’s findings, published on February 12, 2025, came as a shock: they revealed an estimated $7 billion to $13 billion in unreported debt incurred between 2019 and 2023. It became clear that over the course of his second term, Sall had significantly boosted government borrowing and spending as he pursued an unconstitutional third term, all while intentionally misreporting debt figures in legally mandated public accounting to Senegal’s parliament.

The huge debt had gone unnoticed because Senegal’s presidency and finance ministry had hidden it from the National Assembly, the IMF, and the World Bank by keeping unrecorded loans off the books. But the latter two institutions played a role in the accrual of the illegal debt. Since the 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank have been long-term development partners for Senegal, making substantial technical and financial commitments intended to promote growth and reduce poverty. The most recent were a $1.8 billion loan package from the IMF and $300 million in budget support from the World Bank. At that point, these institutions had enough material evidence to discern anomalies, yet they kept financing Sall’s government.

Under Senegal’s program with the IMF, the multilateral lender would have had full electronic access to the government’s fiscal and financial data, enabling it to closely monitor financial activity. Senegalese authorities were required to provide electronic reporting every three to six months, often giving the IMF more detailed oversight of the government’s finances than the country’s own parliament enjoys. Such a discrepancy is reprehensible but by no means unusual. Members of parliament and ministry officials across Africa often appeal to World Bank officials for more detailed information about government finances than their own finance ministry provides.

Red flags appeared in Senegal’s reporting to the IMF as early as June 2021, according to IMF biannual reviews that showed that Dakar had requested modifying performance criteria regarding borrowing and fiscal balance; one review in June 2022 even waived the performance criteria altogether. By the summer of 2023, as Sall faced growing public demands that he step down when his term ended, the IMF would already have flagged serious reporting inconsistencies. But despite the IMF’s substantial access to Senegalese records (and, no doubt, misled by reporting that mixed legitimate data with alleged falsifications and significant omissions), the IMF and the World Bank gave Senegal extra money in 2023: in May, the World Bank greenlighted an extra $300 million in budget support to maintain essential public services, and in June, the IMF approved a new $1.8 billion loan package for Dakar, disbursing $279 million immediately.

Sall likely used the June 2023 disbursement as implicit collateral to convince other lenders, such as the West African Economic and Monetary Union’s regional debt market, to keep loaning him more money. Senegalese authorities submitted internal documents to the IMF in the second half of 2023 that clearly showed overborrowing. In its public December 2023 program review, the IMF identified that a financing “shift” had occurred in Senegal between 2023 and 2024, but it claimed the shift constituted “a debt management operation with no material impact” on Senegal’s debt level.

At best, the IMF failed to carry out the supervision that is essential to its role. At worst, it was pressured to ramp up lending to try to help Sall stay in power. There is some evidence for the latter in the highly anomalous way that the IMF’s reporting acknowledged and rationalized overfinancing, tarting it up as “precautionary liquidity buffers.” Western partners, and France in particular, certainly had reasons for preferring Sall over Faye and Sonko. Sall was a solid Western ally, whereas Faye and Sonko were campaigning on a sovereigntist platform and threatening to leave the French-backed regional currency. At a time when France was rapidly losing African allies to Russia, keeping Senegal close would have been a strong priority.

A DEBT BOMB DETONATES

The IMF and the World Bank are pushing Dakar for talks about restructuring. Yet they have not undertaken efforts to adjust Senegal’s debt service payments or investigate their own roles in exacerbating the crisis; they have merely asked Senegal to create a unified debt directorate and are waiting for the credit crunch to force it to the table. Meanwhile, Sall’s successors, Faye and Sonko, have been harshly punished for the sins of his regime. Senegal’s mushrooming debt problem has hovered over their administration, compelling them to abandon promises to lower electricity and fuel prices, freeze funding for dozens of planned infrastructure projects, impose austerity measures (such as reducing health-care spending by nearly 20 percent), and scramble for new financing.

Worse, the debt crisis has driven a wedge between the reformist duo. Sonko has taken a sovereigntist line and advocated against restructuring the debt (without laying out a convincing alternative), while Faye has preferred to negotiate with the IMF. In May, this dispute blew up their alliance. Faye sacked Sonko from his prime minister role; Sonko resumed his parliamentary seat and was elected the body’s president, with 132 out of 165 members of parliament voting for him. The resulting institutional crisis has pitted Senegal’s executive against its legislature. The latter has the authority to block any budget legislation or debt-restructuring framework that the presidency tries to pass. Sonko warned in June that even if Senegal enters “a crisis involving the dissolution of parliament … there will never be an agreement with the IMF.”

As Senegal’s executive and parliamentary branches remain in a deadlock, the country’s debt continues to grow and the options to address it narrow. The deadlock, however, also reflects the strength and independence of Senegalese institutions, which are nourished by a steady stream of inclusive debate. It highlights the health of a democracy that has been revitalized by a new generation’s participation.

As the leaders of neighboring countries insist that authoritarian rule is necessary to stabilize their countries, Senegal’s democracy stands as a vital rebuttal and applies positive pressure on the citizens and leaders of those countries to seek similar freedoms. Exiled West African civil society leaders often travel to Dakar to pursue graduate degrees, investigate and prepare reports on human rights abuses, and convene conferences on civil liberties. And at a time when West Africa’s rural areas are experiencing deepening abuse and neglect, it is worth noting that these freedoms extend well beyond Senegal’s capital. A few years ago, when Malians and Senegalese people living along the Falémé River mobilized to protest its devastation by gold mining practices, the state responses could not have been more different. Malian forces, siding with miners, beat and detained activists, while Senegal’s Faye issued a decree suspending all mining within 550 yards of the river.

WIN-WIN SOLUTION

Senegal is left with two ugly options: borrow more on worse terms to service its debt or restructure under a new IMF program. Faye is under significant pressure from Sonko’s legislature and the public not to pursue restructuring: the term has acquired a stink, with Sonko calling it a “disgrace.” Restructuring would likely entail highly unpopular measures such as removing fuel subsidies and lowering teachers’ salaries. For many Senegalese people, restructuring recalls the catastrophic structural adjustment programs the IMF imposed on their country in the 1980s and 1990s, which crimped the government’s autonomy and led to cuts in key sectors such as health and education without meaningfully freeing Senegal from cycles of debt and dependence. But in late June, Sonko softened his opposition to restructuring, likely to pave the way for a presidential bid by opening the door for a painful restructuring that will inevitably make Faye look bad.

If Senegal does not restructure its loans, its colossal and criminally acquired debt could crush the economy. Some public salaries are already in arrears, and pensions and energy subsidies could soon face cuts, events that could spark riots and wider unrest. And if the institutional deadlock persists, it could start to erode Senegalese democracy. The IMF already bears some responsibility for the crisis. And now its official insistence on full repayment to creditors is putting Senegal’s macroeconomic stability at risk and undermining the government’s ability to provide health care and education, transition from agriculture to manufacturing, and invest in much-needed public infrastructure.

To pull Senegal back from the brink, Washington should push the IMF and the World Bank to take a significant haircut. Between 2027 and 2031, Senegal is due to pay principal, interest, and fees on its IMF debt amounting to about $891 million; it will owe the World Bank roughly $1.37 billion in debt service over the same period. Taken together, these figures neatly parallel the $2 billion that these institutions lent Senegal in 2023, when it should have been abundantly clear not to. Relief on the approximately $2 billion owed to the IMF and the World Bank could reduce the country’s total external debt service by 16 percent, leaving it with still considerable yet more manageable payments.

The IMF and the World Bank should cancel these payments. These institutions’ principal shareholders, especially Washington and Paris, should urge them to support cancellation and bring other shareholders such as Beijing on board. The IMF and the World Bank likely believe that new oil revenue and increased fiscal pressure (that is, higher taxes and lower fuel subsidies) will allow Senegal to continue to service its debt. They are wrong. Over the past three years, oil revenue has proved disappointing, and much of it may already have been pledged as future sales. Revenues from sharply raising taxes and lowering subsidies will destabilize the country.

Although board members may argue that debt relief sets a bad precedent, the IMF and the World Bank have already helped Argentina on a much bigger scale, and in 2004, the two organizations’ HIPC debt relief initiative, aimed at helping heavily indebted poor countries, granted extensive forgiveness to reduce debt burdens to sustainable levels in Senegal. Canceling Senegal’s debt service would entail trivial losses for these international institutions, which—unlike Senegal—can seek special replenishment from other sources. Beyond assisting Dakar, this relief would benefit Paris and Beijing, its two largest bilateral creditors, by allowing the country to make good on its payments to them. And Paris has an interest in stabilizing Senegal’s debt to prevent a wider contagion. Senegal’s debt crisis threatens the larger regional economic bloc, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, whose shared currency is guaranteed by the French Treasury.

Breathing room would allow Senegal’s leaders to get back to governing and shore up stability in a region that badly needs it. It would also help the IMF and the World Bank retain their reputation for integrity at a moment when such institutions are viewed with increasing skepticism.

Dakar must also launch an investigation into the Senegalese actors responsible for the illegal debt. So far, Faye has declined to do so, likely because he worries his government may have to expose or prosecute political figures whose support he will need in the future. To incentivize Senegal to investigate its own institutions, significant debt relief from international organizations could be made contingent on a public investigation into the illegal debt to ensure a crisis like this cannot happen again and make the country’s institutions even more accountable.

El-Ghassim Wane, a former senior African Union adviser from the Sahel steeped in how good governance helps ward off conflict, noted to us that “the cost of supporting a country that has remained committed to constitutional governance and democratic principles is far lower than the cost of managing instability once it takes hold.” Debt forgiveness would help protect Senegal’s achievements; without it, the country risks falling into a debt trap for years, if not decades. And the region will lose its democratic anchor.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

When A Congressman Beat A Senator Unconscious, America Confronted The Limits Of Free Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:24:38 +0000

In John Magee’s print, Preston Brooks wields a cane against Charles Sumner, who is clutching a pen and a rolled-up speech. John L. Magee, The New York Public Library

BY PAUL QUIGLEY

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

VIRGINIA TECH

On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks strode into the United States Senate chamber and beat Sen. Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, was retaliating for a speech Sumner had given condemning slavery and personally insulting a relative of Brooks.

Though lasting only a minute, the beating had far-reaching consequences. It pushed Americans one step closer to civil war.

And, as I discovered while researching my book “The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War,” it sparked a nationwide debate over free speech, political violence and the relationship between the two.
Speak without reprisal

Northerners denounced the caning as an attack on Sumner’s right to free expression. Even if they thought Sumner’s abolitionism too radical – as most white Northerners did in 1856 – they believed a U.S. senator had the right to say what he wanted without violent reprisal.

Visual images of the caning reflected the Northern take on free speech. In John Magee’s political caricature, “Southern Chivalry – Argument Versus Club’s,” Brooks wields a sturdy stick against a defenseless Sumner, who is clutching a pen in one hand and a rolled-up speech in the other. Winslow Homer’s print “Arguments of the Chivalry” depicts Sumner writing at his desk as Brooks prepares to strike.

Homer’s headline captured the message of both depictions: “The Symbol of the North is the Pen; the Symbol of the South is the Bludgeon,” which is a quote from a speech by antislavery activist Henry Ward Beecher.

Defenders of Brooks insisted any abolitionist speech was too incendiary to deserve protected status. Brooks’ hometown newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, berated Sumner for “licentiously prostituting the principle of freedom of speech,” reflecting the widespread conviction among white Southerners that free speech had limits.
Collapsing the distinction between words and violence

The argument between supporters of Brooks and Sumner was not isolated to the caning incident. Societies throughout history have punished language deemed blasphemous, seditious, inciting or slanderous. In most times and places, authorities have hewed more to slaveholders’ conception of free speech as a limited privilege than to abolitionists’ assertion of an absolute right. In the United States, the idea of free speech as virtually inviolable became mainstream only in the 20th century.

To pro-slavery Americans, abolitionist words warranted violent responses because such words were themselves tantamount to violence.

Alexander Stephens, future Confederate vice president, justified the caning by saying, “I have no objection to the liberty of Speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.”

Another Southern politician wrote to Brooks, “Address your arguments to the Skin, to the physical sensibilities.” And one of the many replacement canes given to Brooks bore the revealing inscription “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

Slaveholders were collapsing the distinction between words and physical violence. Language could constitute violence, and an act of violence could be a counterargument.

This logic has resurfaced in our own time, but instead of slaveholders using it to maintain white supremacy, today it is more often deployed to designate certain types of expression, such as burning crosses or displaying Nazi symbols, as hate speech against marginalized communities. It has also appeared in the increasing moves by the Trump administration to label dissent as terrorism.
Suppressing antislavery language

While most Northerners in the 1850s continued to value freedom of speech over violence, the caning convinced some that they must respond in kind.

One Minnesota newspaper editor hoped that “every Northern member will fully arm himself, and if necessary plant a cannon by the side of his desk to be used as the most effectual argument in favor of Free Speech.”

It was increasingly difficult to keep rhetorical and physical violence separate as the slavery conflict heated up.

This was a new phase in the history of free speech. While abolitionists and increasing numbers of Northerners fought for an expansive idea of free expression, publishing pamphlets and newspapers and submitting petitions to Congress, slaveholders tried to suppress antislavery language.

Terrified that abolitionist words might lead to rebellions by the enslaved, slaveholders feared for their survival. As prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Political reformer Lydia Maria Child described a growing threat: “A slaveholding community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder and, in this age, sparks of free thought are flying in every direction.”

Responding to those sparks of abolitionist free thought with violent repression, including acts such as the Sumner caning, slaveholders’ violence fueled the rise of the new Republican Party. The Republicans articulated their opposition to slavery with their slogan of “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”

Brooks and his kind ultimately brought about their own demise by provoking Northern outrage – outrage that ultimately led to war once the slaveholding South seceded.

Who gets to say what to whom? Are there any words that can justify violence? These questions polarized the country after the caning. In new forms, they continue to confound American politics 170 years on.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Racial Stereotypes Of African Footballers Persist. A World Cup Is A Good Time To Talk AboutThem

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:52:43 +0000

Assumptions about natural differences between black and white athletes are entrenched in the global talent trade. Florian Schmetz/Unsplash

BY UROCS KOVAC AND IKECHUKWU EJEKWUMADU

With a Somali referee being denied entry into the US, and the surge of online racist abuse after 2026 World Cup matches, racism and exclusion in football are once again in the news.

Overt anti-Black racism in football is well reported and researched. Less visible but important structural issues remain little scrutinised, though.

The 2026 World Cup is a perfect moment to examine the deeply entrenched – but often hidden – logic of the global market of footballers that reproduces racist stereotypes about Black athletes.

Assumptions about natural characteristics of African athletes persist in football transfers. Africans are often regarded as physically strong athletes with raw talent that are lacking in discipline and technical refinement. But these assumed characteristics are far from natural – they are actively nurtured.

One of the less obvious places that this happens is in west African football academies that seek to empower young footballers, but effectively reproduce stereotypes.

We are a sport sociologist and an anthropologist who have been researching football-related migrations from west Africa to Europe since 2014. We’ve worked with aspiring footballers in Nigeria, Senegal and Cameroon. Most recently, we interviewed coaches at four football academies in Nigeria, as well as 24 football migrants in Europe. We asked the coaches about their selection strategies, and the footballers about their aspirations and career paths.

Our combined findings show that racial inequality still exists in global football. It can be detected in young footballers’ dreams, football academies’ business models, and the demands of the global market.

Strikingly, it is often reproduced through practices that are framed positively – opportunity, empowerment, inclusion – rather than through overt racism alone. This makes racial inequality in football particularly durable – it happens through strategies that many experience as allowing for social mobility.

This matters, because we cannot fully comprehend racism in sports without understanding the deeply rooted dynamics that fuel it.

‘Whiteman country’

In many west African countries, football has become one of the most attractive ways for young men to migrate overseas. Confronted with a lack of stable economic opportunities and glaring global inequalities, they seek “greener pastures” overseas, where they hope to start earning a living and providing for their families.

The footballers travel everywhere, including Asia and the Gulf States. But the most desirable destination remains Europe. This is because of the enormous popularity of European elite football leagues and the visibility of elite African footballers in European clubs. There’s a perception that European football offers the best prospects for social and economic mobility.

In western Cameroon, Europe is often called “whiteman country”. It’s a catch-all term for “the west” that has ambiguous connotations. Young people see it as a place of prosperity, comfort and economic opportunity, but also of anti-Black racism, overwork and inequality. Many see it as a key destination – often unavailable because of strict border policies – that holds opportunities.

Natural athletes

Myths about Africans as being natural-born athletes persist in the global market.

For instance, one European coach we interviewed in Cameroon emphasised that Africans were immensely talented – they had “rhythm in their blood”. They also reportedly lacked discipline. The coach consistently compared European footballers – allegedly untalented but inclined to work hard – with African players – supposedly very talented but not geared to hard work.

In Nigeria, coaches we interviewed routinely emphasised that Africans had “natural” abilities for sports. Most prominent were myths about physical strength and endurance that were supposedly inherent in African bodies.

Moreover, talented young players were often labelled as “diamonds in the rough”, raw materials with potential but in need of refinement. The labels make for disturbing parallels with images of Africa as full of natural minerals ready to be exploited.

These examples are not isolated or anecdotal – racial stereotypes about African athletes have been documented in studies over and over and over again.

They are also not isolated to football. Similar myths have been documented in many disciplines, like boxing, rugby, American football, and long-distance running.

Cultivating difference

These stereotypes have a profound influence on how football talent is nurtured on the continent.

Our interviews reveal that football academies in Nigeria strategically cultivate footballers that fit global stereotypes of the Black athlete. This is to create value in the global market.

They argue that physical qualities are the most important thing foreign scouts look for in African footballers. So academies strategically select young men who are physically strong, tall, and with high endurance. In the process, they may overlook players with high technical skills and tactical awareness.

In one instance, an academy spent years developing players, but found it difficult to sell the small players, despite their technical prowess. They eventually disbanded the team and selected a new crop of youngsters. This time they had to be at least six foot tall.

The academies, we found, also model the development of players on successful African internationals. They might focus on scouting and developing defending midfielders – a position that benefits from exceptional physical strength. Or they nurture physically imposing strikers like Romelu Lukaku or Victor Osimhen. The academies say they’re exploiting and creating a niche in the global market that’s especially fitting for Africans.

This matters, because football academies, coaches and agents play key roles as gatekeepers in the global market. They promise young footballers – often from underprivileged backgrounds – empowerment and inclusion through access to global markets.

The market is big and complicated, and not all academies reproduce these tropes – at least not consciously. But racial stereotypes clearly continue and have a profound impact on how athletes are selected and cultivated.

Racial capitalism

For a long time, prominent postcolonial thinkers have developed theories about the racial order of the global economy.

US political scientist Cedric Robinson used the term “racial capitalism” to explain how capitalism was built on a foundation of colonialism, slavery, and racial differentiation. That created a society where racialised groups are exploited to extract profit. Capitalism exploits people on the basis of imagined racial differences.

Indian feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote about “strategic essentialism” to highlight how people may deal with these structures. Marginalised groups sometimes use simplified ideas about who they are. This can help them gain recognition or improve their opportunities.

These ideas are remarkably relevant nowadays, and essential for understanding how racial inequalities endure through sports.

Global football shows how markets commodify bodies, commodify difference itself, and continue to fuel these inequalities. It also shows how people respond to this, and how talk of empowerment and inclusion can reinforce inequalities.

These issues are made visible through sport, but they are not exclusive to it. They are also not inevitable.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

DRC Has Taken Rwanda To The World Court Over Genocide Again. A Law Scholar Explains What’s Different This Time

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:25:13 +0000

The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, which is the seat of the International Court of Justice. Wikimedia Commons

BY KERSTIN BREE CARLSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR INTERNATIONAL

LAW, ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) filed a lawsuit against Rwanda at the International Court of Justice at the end of June 2026. The 60-page complaint alleges acts of genocide and other atrocity crimes by Rwandan forces and their intermediaries dating from 1996 to the present day.

The DRC has twice before brought similar cases against Rwanda at this court. Both failed on questions of jurisdiction. So, what explains yet another case against Rwanda? Kerstin Bree Carlson, a scholar of international justice and author of a book on international law in Africa, examines this history and what’s behind the DRC’s confidence in its latest push.
What did the DRC’s previous cases involve?

The DRC has twice tried to bring Rwanda before the International Court of Justice in relation to violence carried out or backed by Rwanda on its soil. It was unsuccessful both times.

In 1999, the DRC brought claims against Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda before the court over the armed invasion of its territory. It sought reparations for armed aggression and intentional acts of destruction and looting.

It later dropped its claims against Rwanda and Burundi because neither country had consented to the court’s jurisdiction.

The case against Uganda went ahead, and in 2005 the court ruled in the DRC’s favour. It found that Uganda was responsible for acts of violence in the country. In 2022, the court ordered Uganda to pay US$325 million in reparations, marking a significant victory for the DRC. Kampala paid the first instalment of US$65 million that year.

In 2002, the DRC resubmitted claims against Rwanda.

The DRC invoked eight international treaties, including the Genocide Convention. This is a UN treaty that entered into force in 1951 and establishes genocide as an international crime.

The International Court of Justice dismissed the DRC’s case on jurisdictional grounds, which drew criticism. The court said it lacked the authority to hear the dispute because Rwanda had entered a “reservation” when it joined the Genocide Convention, rejecting the court’s jurisdiction under the treaty. In the 2006 ruling, a majority of International Court of Justice judges recognised the validity of this reservation.
What has happened in the past 20 years that might change the outcome?

First, in 2008 Rwanda withdrew its reservation to International Court of Justice jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (which came into force in 1969). That means that the jurisdictional hurdle relating to Rwanda’s consent is resolved.

The DRC has invoked both these treaties in its current submission to the court.

Second, in 2008 Rwanda became a party to the Convention Against Torture (which came into force in 1987). Claims made under this UN treaty do not need to meet the same rigorous “intent” standard that genocide claims do. Further, the court’s jurisprudence is well established under the torture convention. For example, claims under this treaty played a critical role in efforts to bring Chad’s former president Hissène Habré to justice.

The DRC has invoked this history in its submission.

Third, international law has evolved. Recent cases like The Gambia’s suit againt Myanmar (2019) and South Africa’s case against Israel (2023) have expanded the Genocide Convention’s reach.

Together, these factors suggest that the DRC’s third attempt may have a stronger chance of clearing the jurisdictional hurdle. However, whether this would eventually lead to a judgment against Rwanda is much harder to predict.
Why has the DRC turned to international law?

International law, the law of nations, creates all nations as equals. The International Court of Justice is the oldest, most established global arbiter of disputes between them.

There are two principles of international law that play out in this case.

First, states are generally bound only by obligations they have explicitly accepted. This includes agreeing to the jurisdiction of the court. Second, international courts have no police force or other means of enforcing their judgments. It is up to states themselves to comply with court rulings. This compliance includes a duty on other states not to recognise as lawful situations created through serious breaches of international law.

Although the court cannot compel states to act, its opinions matter. They represent the most authoritative statements of international legal norms. In other words, International Court of Justice judgments represent the clearest statements we have regarding how international legal principles apply in practice.

Recognising international law’s persuasive power is key to understanding why the DRC has repeatedly turned to the International Court of Justice and other international courts to seek rulings against Rwanda and its proxies. These include the International Criminal Court and the African Court on Human and People’s Rights. International lawfare represents a principled battle for recognition and legitimacy.
Why does the case matter?

The DRC’s creative legal attempts to bring Rwanda to justice in relation to its engagement in and support of armed conflict in the DRC over the past several decades are efforts to invalidate violent incursions on its soil. It also seeks to reassert its sovereignty by having Rwandan-backed violence recognised as illegal by international law’s apex court.

As I have argued before and in my book examining international law in Africa, the power of international law resides in states’ agreements to use it in place of violent conflagration, and to be bound by it.

Rwanda challenges these standards in both regards. Credible allegations of Rwandan-backed massacres in the DRC date from 1996 through to the present day. Despite being the recipient of significant international legal investment, Rwanda resists participating as a good international citizen. So far, neither Rwanda nor its allies are addressing or redressing its behaviour.

By contrast, the DRC is expanding international law’s promise and potential by applying it as intended. International law derives its power chiefly from the expectations it creates.

The DRC is not blameless in the three decades of violence its submission describes. But by framing that violence through the lens of international law, the country helps legitimise alternatives to violence.

Justice Jackson’s Birthright Citizenship Opinion Includes Black Americans In The Story Of The Nation’s Search For Equality

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:44:40 +0000

Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on pending judicial nominations on April 28, 2021, in Washington. Kevin Lamarque/Pool via AP

BY AUSTIN SARAT

WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL PROFESSOR

OF JURISPRUDENCE AND POLITICA;L

SCIENCE, AMHERST COLLEGE

In the annals of Supreme Court decisions, the public likely remembers what justices wrote for the court in famous cases, such as the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.

Or perhaps the public remembers great dissenting opinions that display foresight and speak across the ages. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which legalized racial segregation, is a shining example.

But Supreme Court scholars and the public alike seldom pay much attention to concurring opinions, in which a justice expounds on the views of their colleagues in the majority. Some legal experts have denigrated concurring opinions as “the worst form of legal clutter… that are, usually, better left unwritten.”

On June 30, 2026, in the Trump v. Barbara ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson showed how wrong that view can be when she delivered a monumental concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil. The decision invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny citizenship to children born to foreign parents who are unlawfully in the United States.

Jackson, however, used her concurrence to go far beyond that and offer a new understanding of the origins of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and its promise of equal treatment. She did so while emphasizing the singular contributions of Black Americans to that endeavor.

Along the way, Jackson criticized Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s dominant originalist jurisprudence – centered on interpreting the Constitution based on how it was understood when it was adopted – for distorting the historical record. Jackson has previously signaled that a responsible use of history requires examining all relevant sources instead of cherry-picking among them to make a particular point.

As a politics scholar who has written about history and law, I believe that years from now, when Americans look back on Trump v. Barbara, it will be Jackson, not Roberts, whom they remember.

No shrinking violet

During her brief tenure on the court, Jackson has shown herself to be no shrinking violet. From the start, she has made her voice heard during oral arguments and in her written opinions.

As political scientists Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman wrote in December 2022, after her first three months as a justice, Jackson “was by far the most active participant in oral arguments.”

Since then, nothing has changed about Jackson’s style on the bench. The Washington Examiner reports that she “took up more than 20% of the Supreme Court’s questioning last term.”

Jackson also is not shy about writing dissenting opinions, and the occasional concurrence, whether in combination with others or alone. In both her dissents and concurrences, Thomas, the court’s only other Black member and its leading proponent of originalism, has been one of her main targets.

For example, in her 2023 dissent from the court’s decision to end affirmative action in higher education, Jackson directly criticized Thomas when she wrote that “those who demand that no one think about race … refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

Originalism, Jackson-style

Jackson has also called herself an originalist. However, she departs from Thomas’ brand of originalism.

For Jackson, to understand how any provision of the Constitution was understood requires unearthing sources of constitutional meaning that have been largely ignored by others on the court.

That vision was on display in her concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case. There, Jackson paid particular attention to what Black Americans did in inspiring and crafting the 14th Amendment.

This contrasts with the traditional originalist story that highlights white protagonists such as Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, who introduced the proposal to add the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, or President Andrew Johnson, who resisted the 14h Amendment on the grounds that it infringed on states’ rights.

Justice Thomas embraced this sort of vision in Trump v. Barbara. As he tells it, the birth of the 14th Amendment can be traced to the concerns of members of the Reconstruction Congress that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which extended certain fundamental rights to “all persons born in the United States,” would be repealed or overturned in the courts.

Black people have little or no role in Thomas’ account.

Black Americans and birthright citizenship

Jackson’s opinion registers her impatience with such an exclusion. She faults Thomas for his “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment (that) bears little relationship to the history of its ratification.”

Instead, Jackson traces the 14th Amendment to work done by people “within and beyond Congress.”

Jackson follows Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s suggestion that originalist judges should always attend to “all the people who are basically knocking on the windows and banging on the doors with their ideas about what should be in the Constitution.”

As Jackson recounts, “In the decades leading up to the ratification of the 14th amendment, black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country. There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding of the 14th amendment and, later, for the black civil rights movement more generally.”

Contrary to Thomas, who argues that birthright citizenship applies only to former slaves and their offspring, Jackson notes that Blacks “helped galvanize the push for full equality.” When ratified, Jackson explains, “the citizenship clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the colored conventions and their allies in Congress.”

And in a pointed dig at her colleague, Jackson writes that the “distortion of historical facts – retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims” – poses a grave threat to the constitutional project and America’s well-being.

Extending the work of the 1619 Project

Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright case builds on the approach to history taken by the so-called 1619 Project. That project, unveiled by The New York Times in 2019, “aimed to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, insists “the United States simply would not exist without us. The idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of black Americans have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”

Jackson fully embraces that story and, in her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, extends it to include what happened in 1866 when the U.S. restated and renewed its founding commitment to equality. She suggests that the 14th Amendment would not have come into being without similar “patriotic efforts” by Black Americans.

What makes Jackson’s concurrence extraordinary, Slate’s Robyn Nicole Sanders writes, “is that it insists on telling the 14th amendment story honestly … (and) it is at moments elegiac in its remembrance of the people whose suffering and resistance gave birth to the citizenship clause.”

That is why I believe Jackson’s concurrence will be remembered as one of the great opinions produced by a Supreme Court justice.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Serving A State That Couldn’t Pay: Why South Sudan’s Civil Servants Didn’t Quit During The War

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:25:17 +0000

Public administration, Yambio, Western Equatoria, South Sudan. Emmanuelle Veuillet, Author provided (no reuse)

BY EMMANUELLA VEUILLET

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

UNIVERSITY OF JUBA

When civil war broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, civil servants found themselves at the centre of a deep political and economic crisis.

The state was, and remains, the largest employer, surpassing private companies and NGOs. In 2015, the approved national budget accounted for 465,041 government personnel. Over 85% were engaged in security-related functions. Despite the absence of official statistics, observations confirm that the civil service has not shrunk over the years.

As the conflict became increasingly politicised and shaped by ethnic divisions, civil servants had to navigate shifting loyalties and growing insecurity.

The war also triggered an economic collapse. In 2015, the South Sudanese pound lost nearly 90% of its value against the US dollar. Trade routes were disrupted. Domestic production of products declined and shortages of imported goods fuelled hyperinflation.

The near-total collapse of oil exports – the government’s main source of revenue – severely weakened state finances. By late 2015, the government was effectively bankrupt and increasingly unable to fund the public sector.

This resulted in long delays in civil servants’ salary payments from several months to a year. Hyperinflation also eroded the value of wages.

This did not lead to a mass exodus from the civil service, however. During my PhD fieldwork, I found that many civil servants chose to stay. As a political sociologist, I was interested in understanding their decision to remain in a broke administration during such challenging times. I explored the little-known wartime experiences of ordinary middle-ranking civil servants to make sense of it.

Drawing on 22 months of fieldwork in South Sudan, I found that civil servants chose to remain in government because – despite the absence of a salary and direct income – their jobs provided benefits. These included social status, and access to networks and opportunities. The job provided a sense of normality, too, during a period of political upheaval. It was also a realistic route to paid employment in a hoped-for future. Other options were scarce.

The civil war formally ended with the 2018 peace agreement, but South Sudan remains mired in political and economic crises. My findings help explain why, despite repeated shocks, state institutions have endured.

The study

I collected the data in my study between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Western Equatoria in South Sudan. The region doesn’t have oil resources, hosts a variety of ethnic groups and plunged into war later than many others. I relied on observations from various administration offices at county and state levels, and informal conversations held during these visits.

As part of my research, I followed the stories of six civil servants – two women and four men – from different departments and directorates at the county and state levels. They held different grades within the administration. They were aged over 30 and held at least a high school certificate.

The findings

My study shows that civil servants’ attachment to a state with no money was shaped by material, social and political factors.

Before the war – from independence in 2011 to 2013 – even lower-ranking government jobs provided civil servants with a modest but stable standard of living. For instance, a cleaner (grade 16) in public administration earned around US$180 to US$200 at the time. But after the conflict began, that economic security disappeared.

By April 2017, a director’s monthly salary (grade 3) could only buy a 20kg bag of rice and a 10kg bag of red beans. An administrative officer’s (grade 12) salary could barely pay for 2kg of rice.

All civil servants had to look for other sources of income for daily survival. These included farming, small-scale businesses, and renting or selling properties. The economic security attached to a position in the civil service had vanished.

Yet civil servants continued to go to the office because it still gave them access to other forms of resources, helped them maintain their status and preserved an appearance of normality.

The benefits included:

access to opportunities, such as NGO trainings and workshops that provided per diems for the period of participation, or a certificate of attendance that could be added to a CV

the knowledge and power to help people and do favours, which helped them cultivate social networks that could be used to access goods, services or credit

preserving social position and maintaining practices that reinforced a sense of normality, both in the eyes of others and for themselves

a shared experience which fostered forms of solidarity and mutual understanding among civil servants. They organised social activities and support mechanisms, such as savings groups, among themselves rather than with other social groups.

A desired future

Despite the South Sudanese government’s withdrawal from many of its social responsibilities, civil servants continued to imagine a different kind of state. Those I interviewed shared a vision of a strong and functioning state.

It was often accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, as they imagined themselves helping to build such a state. Maintaining the functioning of state institutions and preserving some level of public service during the crisis became a meaningful commitment, a survival strategy and an investment in upward mobility within a “wished-for state”.

The decision to remain in this career was also shaped by a lack of alternatives, however. Middle-ranking civil servants had relatively low levels of formal education and lacked the networks needed to secure other employment. The private sector has remained small because of a difficult business climate and a lack of economic diversification.

The total collapse of a functioning state would mean the disappearance of their jobs – which helps explain their efforts to keep the administration going.

The economic crisis in South Sudan raises questions, however, about how long civil servants can continue to sustain state institutions.

In many cases, salaries have gone unpaid for more than a year. And cash shortages in banks prevent civil servants from accessing whatever funds may be available to them.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

South Sudan At 15: How The Political Elite Have Found A Way To Profit From Peace As Well As War

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:01:31 +0000

Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Wikimedia Commons

BY MARTIN BENSON STROHMAYDER

RESEARCH FELLOW AND SUDANS RESEARCH

DIRECTOR, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011 was meant to close the chapter on one of Africa’s longest civil wars: the north-south war that preceded it. Formally, it did. But independence did not end the deeper struggles over power, revenue and coercion inside the newly independent state.

South Sudan returned to war in 2013, watched a 2015 settlement collapse, and now lives under a 2018 Revitalised Agreement whose promised transition has been postponed repeatedly.

This is usually told as a story of failed peacemaking, with too many spoilers and too little political will. But what if these deals are not failing so much as working? What if they stabilise order precisely by preserving the systems that make violence profitable?

Political settlements theory helps explain why peace agreements often focus on dividing power, offices and resources among elites. The hope is that if rival leaders receive a share of power, offices and resources, they will have less reason to fight. But negotiated transitions can also carry wartime systems into peace. The question, then, is not only who gets a share of the state, but what kinds of war economies, revenue systems and coercive practices are being preserved.

As an economic historian of war and peace, I have spent more than a decade tracing how rulers in South Sudan and Sudan raise money, goods, labour and other resources, and how payment is enforced through soldiers, officials, checkpoints and offices. My recent research paper examined how South Sudan’s peace agreements reshaped the country’s systems of revenue, spending and coercion: who could extract resources, who could allocate them, and who could enforce payment.

My analysis drew on 2020-2024 fieldwork and archival, secondary and peace agreement data. I sought to answer three questions: who collected revenue from monetary and non-monetary sources, such as cash, cattle, grain and labour; who paid; and who benefited.

What emerges is that peace settlements have redistributed access to money, offices and external finance among elites, while leaving intact the coercive revenue system and war economies that preceded them. In some cases, peace has formalised those systems by turning wartime access to extraction into recognised office, revenue authority or security control. Violence changes form rather than ending; it recedes from the battlefield and lodges in the revenue systems, security forces and war economies that continue to extract from civilians – now in the name of order.

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

The same machinery makes the state itself a prize: controlling it is so lucrative that capture remains worth fighting for, and when the power-sharing breaks down, as it did in 2013, the fighting returns. Peace and war become two settings of one extractive machine rather than true opposites.

Similar dynamics have emerged in other resource-rich, conflict-affected states, such as in oil-rich Angola and the mineral endowed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). South Sudan is resource-rich too, above all because of oil. But the wider issue is not only natural resources. It is the political control of revenue streams such as oil, customs, aid, loans, contracts, checkpoints, timber, charcoal and other forms of extraction.

It’s all part of a wider pattern in peacemaking that has repeatedly paired political deals with economic reforms that entrenched elite control over revenue and other resources.

None of this is inevitable. A different approach would start by treating the whole revenue complex as the heart of peacemaking itself, not as a technical issue to be postponed until after a peace agreement is signed. It would ask who controls money and other resources, including humanitarian and development assistance; who is allowed to extract resources, payments and labour from civilians; and whether people can see anything in return for what they pay.

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

South Sudan’s national revenue system includes taxes, customs, fees, oil revenues, international loans, aid and off-budget income. It also includes non-monetary extraction, such as cattle, grain, labour and goods taken from civilians. These flows are enforced through soldiers, security forces, government offices and checkpoints. Together, they form what I call a revenue complex: the machinery through which rulers extract the resources that allow them to govern, reward allies and sustain coercive power.

In much of South Sudan, “peace” has reshuffled who profits from the revenue system, not what it does to those who pay. A businessman in Malakal, a city in Upper Nile State, described the tax system as “organised robbery” in which soldiers were overcharging and pocketing the proceeds. He was told that the system had to be endured to “maintain peace”.

Predation was not a breakdown of order; it was a condition of order.

None of this began with the peace process. My peace agreement analysis starts in the early 1970s, but in separate archival research and an earlier round of just over 200 interviews, I traced the territory’s revenue complex back to at least 1899. Across colonial, rebel and independent rule, I found a similar logic: revenue sources were used to secure rulers’ control more than to fund public goods.

Across more than 120 years, changes in government did not dismantle the underlying machinery of extraction and control. Each major political settlement since the 1970s has been laid over that inheritance, reshuffling who profits from it.

Confusion is integral to the system. Traders described being shuttled from office to office to meet fresh demands; collectors themselves spoke of decrees “passed from nowhere” that shifted revenue to other units. A businesswoman in Wau described fierce competition for tax collection posts because of what could be skimmed from them. This is not administrative failure, but a system that works for those who run it. When revenue authority is spread across overlapping offices, no one can be held to account and everyone can be rewarded for their loyalty.

This performance of state finance runs all the way up. In 2012, the president conceded that some US$4 billion in oil money had simply been “stolen”. In 2026, a UN panel of experts found that South Sudan continued to sell oil months in advance of delivery, and that disputes over undelivered oil cargoes and oil-backed debts had reached UK commercial courts.

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

South Sudanese nevertheless do not reject the idea of contributing to public authority. They contrasted community-level payments and contributions, which they could see returning as boreholes, roads or clinics, with state taxation, which they experienced as extraction without return.

Many insisted that paying tax is good, so long as it is reciprocal, transparent and tied to public goods.

The problem is that peace agreements often leave that link severed, even as they formalise new bargains among elites.

What non-predatory peace would require

A different kind of peacemaking would mean taking the following steps.

rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex

linking what people pay to what they receive

making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.

Lastly, South Sudanese civic actors should be supported to monitor the cross-border flows – oil, arms, timber, charcoal, looted goods and finance – that fund fighting.

This work does not fall solely to donors and mediators. People are already documenting where the money goes.

A serious settlement would treat them as central to any peace worth the name.

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