THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES

What Is ‘Food Is Medicine’? – 2 Experts Explain This Decades‑Old Approach To Healthcare That Is Taking On New Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 09:22:07 -0800

Food is medicine prescribes healthy foods to help patients manage chronic illnesses. udra/iStock via Getty Images

BY MEAGEN ROSENTHAL AND NATALIE MINTON

Mountains of scientific evidence support both the negative and positive effects of our eating habits on our health. Research shows that a healthy diet can help those suffering from chronic health conditions like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.

This is where “food is medicine” comes in. Food is medicine, also known as “food as medicine” and “food prescriptions,” is a movement dedicated to providing healthy food – fruits, vegetables and sometimes healthy proteins – based on a clinician’s prescription in order to prevent, manage or treat specific clinical conditions.

Prescribing food to patients is intended to convey that food is just as important as medication for health and wellness.

As researchers whose work focuses on food access and health in rural communities, we have firsthand experience running food is medicine programs in our local area in northern Mississippi. This experience has shown us the benefits and limitations of these programs in our community.
Fighting food insecurity

Food is medicine programs can be delivered through curated food boxes, grocery vouchers and medically tailored meals. Most programs are collaborations between nonprofit organizations, health clinics and healthcare providers. The goal of food is medicine is to improve patient health, especially for those with chronic conditions, while reducing healthcare costs.

Increasingly, food is medicine programs have become lifelines for people with food insecurity. In 2024, more than 47 million Americans, including 7.3 million children, lived in food-insecure households – meaning they were at some point uncertain of having, or did not have, enough food for everyone in the household.

Internationally, the number of people experiencing hunger rises to roughly 673 million. Rural populations are more likely to be food insecure due to the loss of local grocery stores and distance from urban centers. Unlike a food bank, food is medicine programs provide only healthy foods, which are often curated by a dietitian, to optimize patient health.

Forward momentum

Though food is medicine isn’t formally connected to the Make American Healthy Again movement, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has brought new energy and attention to the concept. In January 2026, the second Trump administration launched a campaign encouraging Americans to “Eat Real Food.”

But the food is medicine movement actually began more than 60 years ago. One of the early providers who prescribed food as medicine was civil rights activist and multiple Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Jack Geiger. In the 1960s, he co-founded community health centers in South Boston and the Mississippi Delta.

When government officials chastised him for prescribing food to patients in the Delta, Geiger responded, “The last time I looked at my textbooks, the most specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”

Since then, thousands of community organizations like Community Servings and Project Open Hand have provided healthy food to vulnerable community members.

In 2023, the president of the American Heart Association convened an advisory group of researchers and physicians to review current food is medicine research and suggest next steps for work in this area. This advisory has suggested that these programs could help prevent or manage chronic conditions, saving the U.S. healthcare system an estimated US$4.3 trillion annually.

Food is medicine has also started to gain international momentum. In 2025, the Rockefeller Foundation supported a meeting of international scholars, policy experts and practitioners that established the Food Is Medicine Global Alliance. This organization plans to help integrate, sustainably finance and routinely deliver food is medicine programs worldwide by 2030. So far, it has released several reports highlighting the current food is medicine environment and made resources available to providers looking to start their own programs.

Food is medicine in our local community

Food is medicine programs can use food from local farms or grocery stores, and the means of getting the food to patients varies. The four projects we have run to date have been relatively small and local.

One was a food box pickup program that supplemented fruits and vegetables for 55 households whose members demonstrated food insecurity. We followed the participants for two years and found statistically significant reductions in weight, waist circumference and triglyceride levels in the primary adult participants.

For two of our other programs, including one that is ongoing, we partnered with local farmers. One was a pilot test of a food box delivery program for housebound people. Both the recipients of the food and the farmers reported high satisfaction with the program’s delivery and felt the program strengthened community connections while also supporting local agricultural livelihoods.

What other researchers have found

One recent large-scale literature review identified 14 trials of food is medicine interventions and found that these approaches often positively influenced diet quality and food security.

Another review of food is medicine programs for people with diabetes found significant increases in fruit and vegetable intake and reductions in blood sugar levels. This data supports our own previous findings.

However, the effect of food is medicine programs on long-term health outcomes has been inconsistent, in part because many trials have been too small or not rigorous enough to determine causation. In some cases, the “dose” – that is, the amount of food provided – is limited by grant funding. Our food box pickup project supplemented only four to five meals each week, which may have been insufficient to significantly improve all health outcomes.

Moreover, it will be important for researchers to consider the logistics of making these programs work in various local food environments. Global factors like changing weather patterns and, more recently, delays in fuel and supplies from the Strait of Hormuz have increased prices of staple food products like cereals and vegetable oil and led to shortages of cooking oil in some countries.

Food is medicine can be appealing because it makes intuitive sense. But going forward, larger, high-quality studies are needed to adequately track clinical outcomes from the various types of food is medicine programming. If studies show food is medicine is beneficial, it could lead to a shift in how healthcare practitioners approach diet for patients with chronic illness. Access to healthy food would be considered as essential as medications for patients with chronic illness.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Picture Perfect

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 14:47:13 -0800

Ray Russell campaigner Noah Derucher and onlookers view election results at a Democratic watch party. (Photo: Noah Williford)

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

Sometimes an image captures a moment, and a mood, perfectly. That was the case last week when Noah Williford, a photographer for The Appalachian, Appalachian State University’s independent student paper, took the picture above at FizzEd, a bar in Boone, North Carolina, on the night of the midterm elections. “You could feel this vibe shift,” Williford told me. “It felt like this representation of what was going on nationally in this little bar and restaurant downtown.”

Williford told me that The Appalachian, founded in 1934, fills an important local news gap. “A lot of smaller newspapers are owned by larger companies and are letting go of staff or increasing prices. People in places like Appalachia are going to look for news that they both can trust and can afford. And that historically is student media,” he said. “Not just across Appalachia, but also across the state of North Carolina, people are increasingly looking to their local college newspaper, their local college radio station.”

Williford’s picture gained national attention when Chris Moody, one of his professors at Appalachian State, posted it on X with the caption: “This photo from Election Night in Boone, North Carolina, is a modern Norman Rockwell painting.” The post now has more than twenty-four thousand likes. Williford said he grabbed the shot just as people in the room learned that the New York Times had flipped its prediction in North Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District race, from Virginia Foxx, a Republican who has held office since 2005, to her Democratic challenger, Chuck Hubbard. (As of press time for this column, the race had yet to be called.)

“The thing that makes me grin about it, especially in today’s day and age, is that it’s shockingly earnest. It’s people who decided to go out on a Tuesday night just with the hope of something good, you know? There’s no cynicism,” Williford told me. “You realize this blue wave, as we call it, is thousands of people across the United States, collectively trying to believe in something different.”

It was not just the White House and MAGA Republicans who had a no-good, very-bad week last week. The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s erstwhile blog, which Paramount acquired for roughly a hundred and fifty million dollars last year, had a run of editorial mistakes that suggested a stunning lack of basic journalistic standards.

On Tuesday night, Olivia Reingold, a Free Press writer who was once described as “Bari Weiss’s most loyal soldier,” broke the “news” on X that she had spotted “Valentino heels, a Chanel bag, a Moncler jacket, Rolex watches, and a YSL bag among other designer items” at what she said was “Abdul El-Sayed’s election night event.” The post included a picture of a woman’s feet in Valentino Rockstud leather heels and a quilted gold Chanel bag. The implication, I think, was that Reingold was exposing hypocrisy among the champagne crowd at El-Sayed’s party. Whatever the aim, within an hour she posted a curious clarification: the woman photographed was not at Senator-elect El-Sayed’s election party, she was at a “party for the entire Michigan Democratic Party, so it’s a data point for the entire state apparatus, not just Abdul El-Sayed’s camp.” What was the data point exactly? Who knows. But given the Islamaphobic bent of Reingold’s previous coverage, the signs point to something racist.

That was not the end of it. Social media sleuths quickly pointed out that the photo was AI-generated. (Vanity Fair published an impressive forensic fashion analysis on why the items were not authentic.) Two days later, Reingold posted what I suppose qualifies as a second clarification: “Hello my name is Olivia Reingold and I used ChatGPT to brighten and sharpen an image of a woman in Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag. After processing, it still shows these same things: a woman wearing Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag. She is a real (and chic!) woman, really wearing those items. The observation holds.” She still has not told us what, exactly, the observation was supposed to be. The AI image is still on her feed.

If Reingold understands that using AI to “brighten and sharpen an image” is generally not acceptable practice in news, you certainly wouldn’t know it from her note, which gives the impression that she is more affronted by being held to a journalistic standard than concerned about having violated one. A spokesperson for The Free Press did not respond to a question about whether the publication, as an entity of CBS News, has any policy governing the use of AI, particularly when it comes to producing or altering photographs.

Reingold, who was last seen filming herself (rather than the scene) at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting, rose to Free Press fame with popular influencer-style videos. Lately, Maya Sulkin, another Free Press reporter, has joined her ranks. Last Wednesday, Sulkin posted a reaction video to The Free Press’s X account in which she blankly watched El-Sayed’s victory speech and declared that he had delivered it in Arabic. She also implied that Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota, delivered her speech in Somali, and concluded that Americans had just elected “socialist and Islamist people who don’t share American values and want to completely change America.” After viewers of the video complained, a community note was added to the post: “Apart from his own name spoken idiomatically with Arabic pronunciation, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed used four Arabic words in his victory speech, which represents 0.27% of the words he spoke.”

The Free Press first added a correction on X, saying the video was inaccurate (but not adding anything where the video appeared on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok), before finally deleting the post two days later. In a statement, The Free Press said it had taken down the video because it “contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse” and did not meet the standards of the outlet’s “rigorous editorial process.” A spokesperson declined to answer questions about the editorial and ethical standards at The Free Press and CBS News, describe the editorial process referenced, or clarify whether anyone at the publication would face consequences for the incident, including Sulkin.

You might reasonably think that that was finally the end of it. You’d be wrong. Anand Giridharadas revealed on social media late last week that he had recorded a podcast interview with Reingold about his new book, Man in the Mirror, that hadn’t been released, and suggested it had been shelved for ideological reasons. “It was about the Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny case, which we both covered,” Giridharadas posted. “It was a powerful conversation because there were real differences.” When I reached out to him, Giridharadas told me that he had done the interview precisely because he hoped “to try to get out of echo chambers.” (The Free Press did not respond to my questions about this, either.)

The Free Press is no longer the small, contrarian digital darling that helped Weiss improbably ascend to the top spot at CBS News. For better or worse, it is now part of a global news operation that is supposed to display the highest editorial integrity. One way Weiss could demonstrate that she is up to the task would be to demand that the publications and journalists she oversees adhere to exacting standards. But, to do that, she’d have to see the value in it.

As Giridharadas told me, “I would just say to Bari and the leadership, they right now have a scandal of publishing fake AI-generated content. They should feel proud that the content they generated with me was the opposite of AI. It was two human beings, deeply grappling across difference and having the conversation. And if they are more comfortable publishing fake photographs than real conversations, she has ceased to be the person she promised she would be.”

If you’re even moderately aware of online culture, you’ve probably heard of Clavicular, the influencer widely regarded as the world’s number one “looksmaxxer.” For the uninitiated, looksmaxxing is a subculture, popular among young men and adolescent boys, built on obsessive pursuit of physical perfection, a phenomenon that evolved out of incel communities and the manosphere. As The Atlantic’s Ali Breland told CJR’s Ivan L. Nagy back in February, the guys in this world are “symptomatic of the nihilistic stream of slop that is going viral now.”

Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death, a fascinating new docuseries released by Hulu on Tuesday, explores the origins of looksmaxxing, tracing its roots to a controversial fitness personality named Anthony Hughes, better known online as Tony Huge. A biohacking guru with cartoonishly large muscles and a devoted online following, Huge lives in Thailand surrounded by a harem of women and alpha males who seek his counsel. His methods are an extreme expression of toxic masculinity, literally fueled by steroids, peptides, amphetamines, meth, ketamine, and other drugs.

“Women have been dealing with these unhealthy, toxic beauty and health standards forever. And now it’s happening quickly with men, because you can’t go online without your insecurities being preyed on,” Jennings Brown, an executive producer on the series and the journalist who developed the show, told me. “These men are taking it to such a toxic, extreme level that they’re dying or having heart attacks in their twenties and thirties or other strange pulmonary-health issues, because they want to increase their SMV, their sexual market value.”

Huge emerges as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, seemingly unable to understand the creatures he has spawned or to confront the destructive consequences of his experimental practices. In one particularly telling scene, he appears genuinely shocked by the extreme surgeries that Androgenic, the second most popular looksmaxxer, is planning to undergo while in Thailand. When some of the influencers in Huge’s orbit begin dying under mysterious circumstances, he seems incapable of processing their deaths or considering his own possible culpability.

At times, the project can feel like a lurid dispatch from a world so detached from reality that it’s hard to see its relevance to the broader culture. But the influence of looksmaxxing on young men cannot be overstated. It has become enormously popular among adolescent boys in recent years, bringing with it very real risks to their physical and mental health.

“Body dysmorphia is very popular now, and it’s kind of in everything. It’s affecting men in a way that it’s always affected women. We’re seeing it unfold in unusual ways that we aren’t really prepared for as a society,” Jennings told me. “It bleeds into everything.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Cabo Verde’s Presidential Election: The Stakes In One Of Africa’s Most Stable Democracies

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 07:14:05 -0800

House of Parliament in Praia, Cabo Verde. Wikimedia Commons

BY JOSE SANTANA PEREIRA

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, RESEARCHER,

UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA

Cape Verde’s presidential election takes place against the backdrop of a democratic record that remains unusual in its regional context. The country, made up of an archipelago of islands off the coast of west Africa, has sustained multiparty competition for more than three decades. It has had peaceful transfers of power and no coups or military takeovers since independence from Portugal in 1975.

Cabo Verde (population 530,000) is a semi-presidential republic in which the president is directly elected. The prime minister is appointed by the president in light of parliamentary election results, and heads a government that is politically accountable to the national assembly.

The president represents the state and safeguards the constitution, while the prime minister and the government conduct public policy.

The presidency nevertheless carries substantial political weight. The president can veto legislation, request constitutional review and, under certain conditions, dissolve parliament. The office also entails responsibilities in foreign affairs and national defence.

The president is, therefore, not the principal policymaker. However, the way in which these powers are exercised can become particularly consequential when the president and prime minister belong to opposing political camps. This might indeed be the outcome of the 15 November 2026 election.

I am a political communication specialist who has researched the dynamics of Cabo Verde’s presidential elections. In my view the central test for the upcoming poll will be whether the country’s institutions can continue to function effectively while preserving the important distinction between the presidency and the government.

The background

Cape Verde’s political climate is shaped by a recent change of government. The African Party for the Independence of Cabo Verde returned to office after winning the May 2026 parliamentary election. This ended 10 years of government by the Movement for Democracy, which now forms the opposition.

The African Party for the Independence of Cabo Verde’s victory reflected growing voter dissatisfaction with a decade of rule by the Movement for Democracy. This is particularly over poor inter-island transport, economic difficulties, living conditions and public security.

The change of government renewed questions about the balance of power between the president, the new government and parliament, as well as the opposition’s ability to hold the ruling party accountable.

The forthcoming presidential election will, therefore, test not only party loyalties but also voters’ expectations of the presidency and its role in the political system.

The two main contenders are José Maria Neves, backed by the African Party for the Independence of Cabo Verde, and Joana Rosa, supported by the Movement for Democracy.

Neves previously served as prime minister between 2001 and 2016. Rosa, a former minister of justice, is the first woman to run for president in Cabo Verde.

They face Antero Tavares, Casimiro de Pina, Gilson Alves and Loisito Sousa. These four offer alternatives to the two parties that have dominated national politics since the introduction of multipartyism in 1991.

These candidates are unlikely, however, to attract support on a scale that would challenge the two main contenders.

The voters

Together with political science researchers Danielton Delgado and Susana Rogeiro Nina, I published a paper that offers insight into the dynamics of presidential elections in Cabo Verde. Our 2019 study found that voters didn’t consistently use presidential contests to punish the governing party. Indeed, except in 2011 and 2021, every presidential election in the country was won by the candidate backed by the party that controlled parliament and the executive.

Also, there was not a systematic advantage for independent candidates or candidates backed by smaller parties. The short interval – one to six months – between legislative and presidential elections may help explain this phenomenon, as presidential contests often take place during the governing party’s post-election “honeymoon period”.

What’s different in the upcoming election?

If Neves secures re-election, the presidency and government will be held by figures associated with the same party. This possibility is not unlikely. Since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1991, every incumbent president who has sought a second term has been re-elected: António Mascarenhas Monteiro in 1996, Pedro Pires in 2006 and Jorge Carlos Fonseca in 2016.

A victory for Neves could play out in one of two ways. It could facilitate cooperation, but it could also raise questions about the president’s independence from the government.

In turn, a victory for Rosa, mirroring the patterns that emerged in 2011 and 2021, would create a situation of divided leadership, with a Movement for Democracy-backed president working alongside an African Party for the Independence of Cabo Verde government.

Such an arrangement is not inherently problematic. Nevertheless, it can require negotiation when constitutional responsibilities and political interests diverge.

Cabo Verde has recent experience of this situation: between November 2021 and the formation of the new government in June 2026, Neves dealt with a Movement for Democracy government. This was led by Ulisses Correia e Silva. Despite their partisan differences, relations were generally characterised by institutional cooperation rather than open confrontation.

In short, whoever wins will face a distinct institutional challenge. Neves will have to balance his party affiliation with the constitutional responsibility to act as head of state. Rosa will need to establish a working relationship with a government led by her political opponents.

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East Africa’s Migration Story Is Not Just About Europe – What Policymakers Get Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 06:58:02 -0800

Migrants from Somalia in a disabled skiff wait for assistance under watch from US sailors near the Gulf of Aden in 2009. U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons

BY GIRMACHEW ADUGNA

Migration from east Africa and the Horn of Africa is often portrayed as a journey towards Europe. International news reporting typifies it as the mass movement of people from Ethiopia, Eritrea or Somalia, transiting through Sudan, Libya and the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

But the truth is that people would rather move closer to home: within the region, Gulf states and southern Africa. Around 87% of the 8.5 million international migrants in east Africa and the Horn of Africa come from within the region. They move for work, family, education, trade, security and other reasons.

The perception that traffic mostly heads north comes from popular misconceptions – migration myths.

Narratives matter because they shape people’s understanding of the world, and even government policies.

My research focuses on migration, return and reintegration as well as transnational migrant networks. In a recently published paper I explored contrasting and overlapping narratives shaping migration governance in the east and Horn of Africa.

To understand the narratives and their policy implications, I interviewed government officials, migration scholars, diplomats, international organisations, refugee-led organisations and migrant associations. I also examined previous research, policy documents and media content.

My findings highlight the differences between official narratives and actual experiences. European actors, UN agencies, international organisations and national governments have a role in shaping migration governance narratives. This has led to policies increasingly focused on border control, preventing irregular migration, combating trafficking and smuggling, and returning migrants.

Often overlooked in dominant migration narratives are the voices and lived experiences of migrants and their communities, whose complex realities are frequently reduced to statistics. This means their perspectives, agency and everyday experiences are largely unheard.

The stories about migration influence which problems governments prioritise, where money is spent and which forms of mobility are treated as legitimate.

The narratives driving policies

1. Direction of travel: One of the most persistent assumptions in migration policy is that east African countries are primarily places from which people leave. Yet the region is also a major destination for migrants and refugees. The UN Refugee Agency’s 2026 data shows Uganda hosts about 2.05 million refugees and asylum-seekers, followed by Ethiopia with 1.02 million, Sudan with 910,000 and Kenya with 879,000.

This means migration is a regional system of mobility, in which people move in multiple directions and for multiple reasons. Policies built around a simple origin-transit-destination model can fail to capture what is often a process rather than a single journey.

2. Poverty as the root cause of migration: Another common narrative is that poverty and climate change are the main reasons people leave east Africa. They certainly matter. But the reality is more complicated.

People also migrate because of family and social networks, labour demand elsewhere, insecurity and political instability. They also go in hope of a better future or are driven by established cultures of migration. Somali, Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora communities, for example, can provide information and financial support to relatives and friends seeking to migrate.

The relationship between poverty and migration is not straightforward. Migration to Europe is more expensive than routes towards the Gulf or South Africa. The cost of travelling from Ethiopia to Europe through the northern route is estimated at around US$10,000. The southern route costs about US$4,800 and eastern routes to the Gulf cost about US$700.

People need resources and networks to migrate, particularly along expensive routes.

3. Smugglers drive illegal migration: Human smugglers and traffickers feature prominently in migration policy. East African and European governments all point to this as the main reason people migrate irregularly.

They talk of preventing exploitation, disrupting smuggling networks and managing irregular migration. This view has helped channel a disproportionate share of migration programming and interventions at the expense of other forms and destinations.

But this can obscure other factors. Interviews for my research indicate that limited livelihood opportunities and the absence of accessible legal migration pathways can encourage people to use irregular routes. In some communities, migration brokers are not perceived only as criminals. In parts of southern Ethiopia, for example, brokers have been described as “door openers” because they facilitate access to opportunities elsewhere.

This local perception should not be confused with an endorsement of smuggling. Migrants using these networks can face serious exploitation, abuse and deception. But it does help explain the persistence of smuggling.

4. Research reproduces the same imbalance: My review of the existing literature suggests that migration research in the region has paid relatively little attention to intra-African migration.

This can create a feedback loop. The issues that receive funding are researched. Those findings then inform policy. Policy creates new programmes around the same issues, generating more data and research.

The evidence base can become too focused on Europe-bound migration.

What’s missing and what to do next

The migrants themselves often describe migration in terms of improving their own and their families’ futures. But they, their families, local communities, civil society organisations, informal facilitators, subnational and local governments have little influence over policy.

Communities emphasise employment opportunities and the lack of viable livelihoods at home. Local authorities are more concerned with the immediate effects of migration on their communities. These perspectives are important because they reveal what can disappear when migration is discussed only at the national or international level.

The findings signal the need for change. Governments and international organisations need better data on movement within the continent. Policymakers – and researchers – should ask not only how many people are leaving, but where they are going, why they are moving, how long they stay and what happens when their plans change.

This could reorient policy focus on the movements that matter most to migrants themselves.

Policy initiatives should also shift to providing local opportunities for young people. They should aim to expand legal avenues for labour migration for both skilled and semi-skilled migrants. This should be paired with stronger oversight of recruitment agencies to prevent corruption, fraud and exploitation.

Cooperation between countries of origin, transit and destination should also go beyond border controls and the return of migrants. It should include protecting workers’ rights, holding exploitative recruiters accountable and ensuring that migrants can seek help when things go wrong.

Finally, migration policy designed without the migrants’ perspectives risks solving a problem that looks very different on paper from the one people experience in reality. Their experiences should inform migration policy and programmes.

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When Bad Rulers Go, Do Their Families Face Justice And Is There Reform? Six African Case Studies

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 9 Nov 2026 06:40:27 -0800

Demonstrators in Tunis, Tunisia, during the political uprising in 2011. Wikimedia Commons

BY MICHAEL ASIEDU

RESEARCHER, UNIVERSITY

OF ST GALLEN, SWITZERLAND

When authoritarian rule ends, the leader may leave office, but the ruling family can remain politically consequential.

My research focuses on authoritarianism and judicial politics in Africa. In a recent study, I examined why efforts to hold ruling families accountable took different legal forms. I also sought to understand why those didn’t necessarily lead to changes in how countries were governed.

I compared experiences in six African countries: Angola, Gabon, Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia and The Gambia. I examined court rulings, official inquiries, government records and investigative reporting to trace the legal action taken against members of a ruling family after changes in leadership.

Some transitions resulted in imprisonment. Others led to prosecution in absentia, or financial and administrative sanctions. These forms of accountability can have very different political consequences.

Political transitions are often judged by what happens to the former ruler. What happens to the wider ruling family gets less attention. Prosecutions can signal a decisive break with the old guard. But they can also serve new political interests without changing the way power was accumulated.

My research shows that accountability is not the same as democratic transformation. Legal action can reconfigure elites while leaving important political institutions intact.

For example, members of the family of José Eduardo dos Santos ran Angola for 38 years. The prosecution of dos Santos’ son for fraud demonstrated a shift in political protection within the ruling elite, but the post-independence party remained in power.

In Gabon, the Bongo family ruled for 56 years even though they faced investigations and legal proceedings after changes in leadership.

Conversely, prosecutions can form part of wider processes of institutional change. In Tunisia, former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and members of his family were prosecuted in 2011. The country then introduced competitive elections and adopted a new constitution in 2014. These democratic gains proved fragile, however, as President Kais Saied began concentrating executive power in 2021.

Holding former leaders and their families accountable is not necessarily the same as changing the institutions that allowed them to accumulate power. A political transition may bring lasting change or simply reshape who holds influence. That matters when assessing the transition.

Three pathways of accountability

My research identifies three pathways for holding former ruling families accountable.Custodial prosecution: this refers to criminal proceedings that result in imprisonment. In Angola, José Filomeno dos Santos, son of former president dos Santos, received a five-year prison sentence in 2020 following his conviction for fraud. The constitutional court overturned it in 2024. The supreme court reinstated the conviction. Filomeno eventually received a presidential pardon.

Criminal prosecution in absentia: these are legal proceedings against family members who are outside the country or otherwise absent. In Tunisia, former president Ben Ali and his wife were sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2011 while living in exile in Saudi Arabia.

Financial or administrative action: this includes measures like asset freezes, confiscations and sanctions. In The Gambia, investigations into former president Yahya Jammeh’s financial dealings led to asset recovery measures and sanctions.

Two other factors matter.

Divisions within the ruling elite. These arise when powerful figures within a governing party or political establishment no longer share the same interests. In Angola, president Joao Lourenço investigated his predecessor’s family despite dos Santos still being part of the ruling party. The change in leadership weakened the former president’s political protection.

International leverage. This refers to the ability of foreign governments and institutions to influence accountability. They do this through sanctions or control over assets held abroad. In The Gambia, US sanctions against the Jammeh family led to some justice even when domestic prosecution was difficult.
How accountability unfolded

The countries in my study illustrate how the different forms of accountability play out.

In Angola, proceedings against the dos Santos family show that judicial intervention is possible, even if the ruling party and wider political order remain largely intact.

In Tunisia, prosecutions went beyond the presidential family to former officials and security personnel. But the country’s initial democratic gains proved fragile. Tunisia shows why punishing past rulers and building durable checks on present rulers are separate challenges.

In The Gambia, authorities pursued accountability despite the former ruler and his family being outside the country. Jammeh lost the 2016 election and left for exile in 2017. The new government established the Janneh Commission in June 2017 to investigate Jammeh’s financial dealings. It concluded that the former president had illicitly obtained over US$360 million through public resources.

But they left one question unanswered: would the institutions that enabled the misuse of public resources be strong enough to constrain future leaders?

The three other cases in my study – Egypt, Senegal and Gabon – further illustrate the challenge in achieving meaningful political change in authoritarian states.

Egypt prosecuted former president Hosni Mubarak’s sons, Alaa and Gamal, in 2015. They were sentenced to three years in prison. However, the country’s powerful security institutions survived.

Senegal sentenced Karim Wade, the son of former president Abdoulaye Wade and a former government minister, to six years in prison in March 2015 over corruption. Aspects of the proceedings drew international criticism, however, including a UN finding that his detention was arbitrary.

Gabon prosecuted members of the Bongo family, which had ruled the country for 56 years, over financial crimes in November 2025. This was despite other powerful figures from the previous political establishment remaining influential.

The limits of the law

Across the six cases, I found that legal action was easier when leadership change weakened a family’s protection. Successors were also more likely to pursue legal action when they saw political advantages in doing so.

Whether defendants were within reach of domestic courts also shaped the form accountability took: imprisonment, convictions in their absence, or financial and administrative measures.

This doesn’t make every prosecution a political performance. Legal penalties can be genuine even when they benefit the new leadership. The question is whether accountability becomes a lasting rule rather than an instrument used against yesterday’s powerful family.

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Bottoms Stands On The Shoulders Of Stacey Abrams, Charlotta Bass And Countless Other Black Women Who Dreamed

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 7 Nov 2026 07:07:20 -0800

BY ALLISSA V. RICHARDSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM,

USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR

COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM

There are elections that change the political map. And then there are elections that make you wonder whether the land itself remembers.

Georgia remembers.

The auction blocks. The cotton fields. The lynching trees. The Black women who cleaned governors’ homes but could not dream of becoming governor themselves.

And now Keisha Lance Bottoms has been elected Georgia’s first Black woman governor. The first Black woman elected governor of any American state.

Bottoms has traced her ancestry back five generations to an enslaved person on a plantation near Crawfordville, Georgia.

An ancestor held in bondage on Georgia soil. A descendant elected to govern it.

The same earth. An entirely different claim to power. How many women had to believe in a future they would never live to see?

Bottoms’s victory represents the paradox of Black political advancement amid racial violence and the often-unrecognized labor of women who build futures they may never inhabit. Ultimately, Bottoms’ victory reflects both extraordinary progress and the unfinished work of American democracy.

The children who deserved a future

I keep thinking about the little children.

Between 1979 and 1981, Atlanta was terrorized by the disappearances and murders of Black children and young adults. Mothers pleaded for answers. Families lived in a city where childhood itself had become dangerous.

The murders unfolded just years after Maynard Jackson’s historic 1973 election as Atlanta’s first Black mayor. His victory announced a new era of Black political power. Yet that power could not shield the city’s most vulnerable children. Suspicions of Ku Klux Klan involvement circulated, although the Klan’s responsibility was never established.

That distinction matters. So does the fear.

Bottoms was born in 1970. She was 9 when the murders began. She grew up in the same Atlanta where Black parents searched desperately for their missing children. She belonged to the generation whose futures were being stolen. And now she is preparing to lead the entire state.

What a terrible, beautiful, complicated thing.

Those murdered children were not symbols waiting to become useful to history. They were sons and daughters who deserved the ordinary miracle of growing older. They deserved a future.

Bottoms later occupied the mayor’s office that Jackson first opened to Black leadership. Now she is preparing to occupy the governor’s mansion. History has not erased its cruelty. But it has delivered an astonishing answer.

And this victory does not belong to Bottoms alone.

The woman who sowed the seeds

This victory belongs, in no small measure, to democracy advocate, legislator and lawyer Stacey Abrams. Perhaps those who recognize what Abrams made possible have sent her flowers.

Abrams ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022. She lost both races. But through the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, organizations focused on engaging voters and protecting voting rights, she helped build an electorate that could imagine Georgia differently. She registered voters, challenged barriers to participation, and refused to accept that the South’s political future was fixed.

And now another Black woman has won the office Abrams twice sought, in the third gubernatorial race in a row headed by a Black Democratic woman. There is something biblical about the path Abrams steadfastly cleared. I think of Moses, guiding his people toward the Promised Land but never entering it himself.

Abrams’ journey is not over. Nor should her accomplishments be measured by another woman’s victory. But I believe there is sacred work in preparing a future you may never personally enjoy. Some people plant trees. Some people sit in their shade. Stacey Abrams planted. Bottoms is standing beneath the branches.

And as a scholar of Black media history, I can reach even further back, to another woman who understood the audacity of claiming political power: Charlotta Bass.

In 1952, Bass became the first Black woman nominated for vice president of the United States, running on the Progressive Party ticket.

The future Charlotta dared to imagine

Before the Voting Rights Act in 1965, before the March on Washington in 1963, before Jackson was elected mayor in 1973 and before Abrams or Bottoms drew their first breaths, there was Bass.

A Black newspaper publisher who confronted segregation, police brutality and white supremacist violence in her four-decade ownership of The California Eagle, Bass understood that political power was about more than winning office. It was about who had the right to imagine themselves in one.

Bass ran when a Black woman entering the White House seemed almost unimaginable. Almost. But not to her. I imagine she would have loved this election. And I suspect she would have had pointed questions for Gov.-elect Bottoms.

What will you do for the poor? The disenfranchised? How will you protect the vote that brought you here?

History-making is not the same as justice-making, and representation matters. The true measure of Bottoms’ victory will be whether Georgians experience the more just state she promised to bring about.
The work beyond the win

For generations, Black women have been asked to save a democracy that would not save them. We have carried clipboards, protest signs and entire movements on our backs. We have been told to wait. To be patient. To be grateful.

And now a Black woman has been elected to govern Georgia.

The children have not returned. The past has not been undone. But something has shifted. Charlotta dreamed it. Stacey helped build it. Keisha has won it. And somewhere, another little Black girl is watching. She may not understand the history. She may only know that the governor-elect looks like her. For now, that is enough to begin a dream.

And history has taught us what can happen when a Black girl begins to dream.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Political Journalists in Disarray: Midterms Missteps, A Notable Apology, And A Sturgeon Rescue

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 6 Nov 2026 08:41:34 -0800

BY BILL GRUESKIN

Now and then, the anonymous, sardonic NYT Pitchbot account will post a “Dems in Disarray” message on social media. Sometimes there’s a news peg for it, but just as often, it comes out of nowhere. Pitchbot can now retire the phrase, because our political media pick it up just as frequently, under the guise of something they might call “news analysis”—as we saw in the Michigan Senate campaign.

You’ll recall that last weekend, Haley Stevens, the Democrat who had narrowly lost to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s primary for the United States Senate, endorsed the Republican in the race, Mike Rogers. Stevens said she had been snubbed by El-Sayed’s campaign, and that she was troubled by his stance on Israel. That followed days of sniping between the Stevens and El-Sayed camps.

The conflict led our press to tell the public that This Very Important Issue Is Throwing the Democrats into Disarray. El-Sayed “went so scorched earth on Haley Stevens that he’s having a lot of trouble putting that coalition back together again,” said Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. “Democrats are still struggling to unite behind El-Sayed,” reported PBS. Their “fragile truce is shattering as El-Sayed and former primary rival Rep. Haley Stevens reignite their fraught feud,” warned Politico.

Then, on Tuesday, El-Sayed thrashed Rogers by 7 percentage points. He coasted in Democratic strongholds like Wayne County (which includes Detroit), where his margin of victory was around 44 percentage points, and Washtenaw County (which includes Ann Arbor), where he beat Rogers by 50 points. His margins there even exceeded those rung up by Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic Senate candidate, who beat Rogers in 2024.

And this shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise. In a Marist poll a few weeks before Stevens’s announcement, El-Sayed was getting the support of 95 percent of Democrats.

Recency bias is a powerful drug. Our political press ought to read the warning label before delivering their hot takes.

Every so often, a news organization faces up to its past and confronts not just a single screwed-up story, but a systemic failure of judgment on an important subject. The latest example comes from Serbia’s Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV), which recently issued as searing an apology as you’ll ever hear from a newsroom. It arrived shortly after voters refused to re-elect Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman who had held high positions in the government for more than a decade. During his rule, RTV had fostered a reputation for dismissing independent journalists and quashing investigations that might have displeased the regime.

No more, anchor Goran Eror told viewers: “For many years, this public broadcaster failed to fulfill its role. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, provided one-sided information, and reported uncritically. The right questions were not asked—or no questions were asked at all. And for that, we owe our viewers an apology.” The station then aired video of crowds celebrating the election result—footage RTV hadn’t shown the day before.

RTV’s record was troubling. Two years ago, a roof collapsed at a Serbian train station, killing sixteen people and triggering massive demonstrations. Still, as Predrag Novković, RTV’s program director, told me in an email, “we didn’t report on the student protests and citizen gatherings that lasted more than a year” after the incident. “We avoided stories about high-level corruption, police violence, and legal abuse.” But the day after the election that Vučić lost, “a group of RTV employees went to the general manager and asked to remove the editor in chief.” A new editor “proposed this apology at the start of the news, and many colleagues supported it,” Novković said.

It would have been better if this had come earlier, while Vučić was still in power. Doing it now could be viewed as a ploy to curry favor with an audience whose political preferences are already known. Still, we should applaud any institution—especially one so closely tied to the state—that comes to terms with the past.

And look again at those terms of RTV’s apology: “Kept silent.” “Turned a blind eye.” “Reported uncritically.” Will any US news organization ever issue a similar nostra maxima culpa? Perhaps. But we might have to wait until after Inauguration Day, 2029.

The Trump Justice Department doesn’t always follow what we so innocently used to call “norms,” but its raid on the home of Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who represents Minnesota in the United States House of Representatives, less than a month before the election, was a stunning event. We’ve known for years that Trump has a particular animus for Omar, but raiding the home of a politician over years-old allegations, so close to the end of a campaign, was highly unusual.

The press, understandably, wants to get to the bottom of it, and so last week the New York Times published a piece under the headline “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” It was, as Oliver Twist would say, thin gruel.

The core allegation against Omar, which has been investigated for years, is that she married her brother to get him a green card. (She has never been charged, and her spokesperson recently denied the claim as a “baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory.”)

With that in hand, the Times went forward, and things started getting shaky right from the second paragraph. The story states that investigators “found some evidence” that Omar’s 2009 marriage “was fraudulent.” From there, various allegations in the story are attributed to unnamed “current and former officials.” Throughout the piece, hard evidence is hard to find. Instead, the story rehashes many previous accusations, filled with words like “murmurs,” “rumblings,” “murky,” and such phrases as “evidence suggesting,” “it is also unclear,” and “speculation…has shadowed.”

The fact is, we—and, evidently, the Times—don’t fully know what happened here. Omar has, by her own account, been married multiple times, and it’s possible that somewhere along the way, she entered into a sham marriage. But as the article mentions, there isn’t an obvious path to charging her with a crime. It’s also worth noting that the agencies involved—the FBI and, in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—have chalked up a dismal track record of late when it comes to providing accurate information about investigations or crimes. This story has some interesting threads, but the Times doesn’t have the goods. It ought to wait to publish until it does.

In May of 2025, a company called CoreCivic Inc. asked the State of Minnesota if officials would like to buy its old, long-vacant prison for seventy-five million dollars. The state declined, citing the difficulty in staffing the prison in the remote town of Appleton. That was a lucky break for CoreCivic, as reporters at KARE 11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, discovered. Last August, the US Department of Homeland Security popped up as a buyer, and closed on a new price: four hundred and ninety-five million dollars, or more than six times what the company had suggested to the state. As KARE reported, CoreCivic has been on a roll recently, having sold prisons in California and Kansas for a combined sum of more than 1.7 billion dollars. Apparently, they’re good at real estate, but as KARE notes, this may also demonstrate a sweet return on investment of the company’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution a few years ago to the Trump inaugural committee.

Because I have no life, I spent part of a beautiful Saturday afternoon perusing local Michigan websites to see how they were playing that conflict among Democrats over the Senate race. While on MLive, which covers various communities in the state, I came across this Justine Lofton banger about—are you ready?—a couple dozen sturgeon trapped in murky, shallow pools beneath a dam on the Ontonagon River. Here’s what happened: A twelve-year-old boy discovered the fish and alerted authorities. Before long, some state fisheries technicians, along with members of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, came to the rescue. You have to be pretty ingenious to figure out how to yank a bunch of decades-old, thirty-pound fish out of one body of water and keep them alive while schlepping them for up to twenty-five minutes to cleaner waters. But they did it, the sturgeon survived it, and you should read it.

READ ORIGNAL STORY HERE

Democrats In House Poised To Investigate The Trump Administration, Taking Up A Long‑Standing Power GOP‑Led Congress Ignored For The Past Two Years

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 4 Nov 2026 07:07:59 -0800

BY DREW KURLOWSKI AND GIBBS KNOTTS

Oversight is coming for the Trump administration.

That’s been the message of congressional Democrats throughout the closing days of the 2026 midterm campaign. Now that the party’s candidates have reportedly won control of the House of Representatives, that campaign promise is likely to be carried out. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told The New York Times in late October that among the potential oversight targets were pardons granted by President Donald Trump, possible corruption in government contracting and the Trump family’s cryptocurrency deals.

Routine congressional oversight hearings usually don’t make headlines.

That changed during the second Trump administration.

When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 7, 2025, what took place was a contentious, highly partisan, made-for-TV-and-social-media confrontation.

Bondi refused to answer many questions from Democrats, instead launching personal attacks against these members of the U.S. Senate.

The episode captures a basic tension in congressional oversight: Congress can demand answers, but getting them often depends on the cooperation of the branch it is investigating.

That tension is about to sharpen when Democrats control the oversight process. Their hearings will likely be anything but routine.

From our perspective as political scientists who study the U.S. Congress, congressional oversight has played an important role in American democracy. Here’s a brief history.

Inquisitory powers

In simple terms, oversight is the ability of Congress to ensure that the laws it passes are faithfully executed. This generally means asking questions, demanding information, convening hearings and holding the executive branch accountable for its actions.

Oversight isn’t specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, which lists the powers of Congress, includes the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper,” without identifying an oversight role. Once laws are enacted, Article 2, Section 3, states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

However, the framers viewed congressional oversight as a key component of legislative authority. They wanted presidents to take Congress seriously and structured the Constitution to ensure that the executive would be accountable to the legislature.

As James Madison urged in Federalist 51, the separate branches of government should have the power to keep each other from becoming too powerful. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote.

The framers drew from the examples of the British Parliament and Colonial legislatures. In 1621, Sir Francis Bacon was charged with corruption and impeached as Lord High Chancellor after an investigation by a committee of the British Parliament. And in 1768, the Massachusetts Assembly conducted an investigation of Gov. Francis Bernard that led to a formal request to the King of England for his removal.

At the Federal Convention in 1787 that produced the Constitution, Delegate George Mason noted that members of Congress possessed “inquisitory powers” and “must meet frequently to inspect the Conduct of public officials.” Even though this idea was never written down, it was a habit of self-government that early Congresses put into practice.

Early oversight hearings

Congressional oversight began almost as soon as the first Congress met. In 1790, Robert Morris, the superintendent of finances during the Continental Congress and a financier of the American Revolution, asked Congress to investigate his handling of the country’s finances and was exonerated of any wrongdoing.

During this period, congressional investigations were often referred to select committees – bodies created to perform special functions. These panels had the power to issue subpoenas and hold individuals in contempt. Since there was no official record of debates and proceedings, the public relied on newspaper accounts to learn about what had happened.

In March 1792, congressional oversight exposed businessman William Duer, who signed contracts with the War Department but failed to furnish the needed military supplies. This shortfall contributed to a stunning U.S. military defeat against a confederation of Native American tribes in the Northwest Territory.

Congress eventually removed the quartermaster general from his role for mismanaging the contracts.

Throughout the 19th century, Congress continued to quietly exercise this power.

Hearings from December 1861 to May 1865 on the conduct of the U.S. Civil War produced a detailed record of the war, exposed military wrongdoing and condemned slavery. In 1871, the Senate created a select committee to investigate Ku Klux Klan violence during Reconstruction.
Investigating corruption and criminal acts

Congress started to use its oversight power more aggressively in the 1920s with the Senate Committee on Public Land and Surveys’ high-profile investigations into the Teapot Dome scandal.

Hearings revealed that Interior Secretary Albert Bacon Fall had secretly leased federal oil reserves in Wyoming to two private corporations and had received personal loans and gifts from the companies in return.

The investigation found clear evidence of corruption. Fall was indicted and became the first U.S. Cabinet member to be convicted of a felony.

The U.S. Supreme Court helped to shape the legal foundation of congressional oversight. In McGrain v. Daugherty, decided in 1927, the court held that congressional committees could issue subpoenas, force witnesses to testify and hold them in contempt if they fail to appear. Two years later, in Sinclair v. United States, the court ruled that witnesses who lied to Congress could be charged with perjury.

These cases granted the judicial branch’s sanction to what had long been an implied legislative power, cementing the constitutionality of congressional oversight.

Oversight highs and lows

The modern era of congressional oversight has produced some very important reforms – and some truly regrettable spectacles.

The most important example of bipartisan congressional oversight came in response to reporting by The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The two journalists wrote about the 1972 burgling of Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel and subsequent cover-up efforts by the Nixon administration – and President Richard Nixon himself.

On Feb. 7, 1973, the U.S. Senate voted 77-0 to establish a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, which brought together Democrats and Republicans to investigate what came to be known as the “Watergate scandal.” The committee’s work spurred action in Congress to impeach Nixon, leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and to the enactment of legal reforms to provide an institutional check on presidential power.

Another high point for congressional oversight came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Seeking to learn how the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil had occurred, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss, who chaired the Senate and House Intelligence committees, formed a joint committee to investigate intelligence failures before and after the attacks.

This inquiry produced several important recommendations that were ultimately adopted, including the creation of a director of national intelligence and a Department of Homeland Security, as well as better information sharing among law enforcement agencies

Congress’ oversight can extend beyond the executive branch when the actions of private actors raise questions about existing laws or spur the need for new ones. Investigations into medical device safety and Enron’s 2001 collapse examined malfeasance in the private sphere that existing regulations failed to prevent.

However, the power to expose corruption can also be used as a tool to score partisan points and generate outrage, rather than holding the executive branch accountable for actual malfeasance. Notably, in the 1950s, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy turned oversight into inquisition and used the power of media to amplify his accusations of communist influence within the federal government.

Democracy needs oversight

As we see it, the problem with allowing oversight to become political theater is that it distracts Congress from quieter and more meaningful oversight work. Slow, procedural work isn’t likely to go viral, but it helps keep government accountable. The task of a deliberate legislative body is to reconcile those very different impulses.

Congressional oversight has strengthened the democratic system at many points. But it can also be stymied by an uncooperative executive branch.

After the 2018 midterm elections put Democrats in charge of the House of Representatives, their many attempts to exercise oversight were rejected by the first Trump administration, which refused to send officials to testify at hearings, failed to turn over documents and ignored subpoenas.

Will the next two years of divided government look the same?

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

China Imports Millions Of Donkey Hides From Africa Every Year: New Book Traces The Drivers And Impact

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 1 Nov 2026 06:50:43 -0800

The demand for donkey hides has driven up the price of donkeys in Africa. Becky Awo via pexels renni

BY LAUREN JOHNSTON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CHINA

STUDIES CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF

AEDELAIDE

The demand for donkey hides has grown exponentially over the past 15 years, driven mainly by demand from China. Lauren Johnston is a specialist on China trade with Africa. She has spent several years looking into the donkey trade, and has just published a book, China, Africa and the Market for Donkeys. She answers questions about what she found.

What drives the demand? Which countries have the biggest markets?

The demand is driven almost exclusively by China. The reason is that there’s an ancient traditional Chinese medicine called ejiao, pronounced “e-jyow”, that is now consumed by tens of millions of Chinese women. Ejiao is a donkey hide gelatin-based tonic for the blood. For millennia, it has been used to treat fatigue, dizziness, dry cough and irregular bleeding, and to support female wellness. For most of that time the elixir was handmade and consumed by a small circle of imperial elites. Only over the last few decades did production become industrially scaled.

I’m an economist rather than a nutritional scientist, but my understanding is that ejiao’s medicinal reputation is associated with its collagen-rich composition and the bioactive peptides produced during processing, alongside claims about the mineral properties of the water used in its production. While pharmacological research has identified potentially beneficial properties, the extent to which these translate into clinically established therapeutic effects remains contested. There is also a broader question as to whether comparable benefits could be obtained from alternative, more sustainable sources of collagen or related compounds.

The market for ejiao was until recently mainly medicinal. My book details the very recent – and stunning – commercialisation of ejiao and its transformation into an array of products, from cakes and drinks to cosmetics and other wellness products. Where ejiao sells at accessible prices in pharmacies both over the counter and by prescription, it also sells for thousands of renminbi at the premium end of the market. The lead producer, Dong'e Ejiao, spearheaded premium-end price increases greater than those enjoyed by Shanghai and Beijing property owners over the 2000s and 2010s.

There is also demand for it in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US, Europe, Australia and south-east Asia.

How do African countries feature in terms of supply?

Africa is home to the world’s largest donkey population. As the ejiao industry began to run short of donkey hides from around 2010, the continent became a target of the supply chain, both legal and illicit. Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania were among earlier targets, given both their donkey supplies and closer geography to China. But demand for donkey hides – and the returns – grew to be so great that essentially no donkey in Africa was safe.

One donkey hide can fetch over US$400 in China.

Donkeys have been working animals in Africa for eons. The market is largely informal. Given the price their hide can achieve, donkeys are being sold even though their work is vital. Added to this, the slow breeding rate of the donkey is affecting supply. The cycle presents a compounding extinction risk.

Porous and remote borders, different regulations and patchy application of regulation has made stemming the trade almost impossible. My book elaborates Tanzania’s experience. The country gave up trying to secure a continent-wide formal agreement to halt the trade. This was after its frustrations with donkey smuggling across the Kenyan border especially, its failure to regulate slaughter numbers and standards, and a failure to develop sufficient breeding programmes.

What steps have been taken to halt exports? Have they worked?

The first Pan-African Donkey Conference in 2022 included representatives from the African Union InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the government of Tanzania and other government representatives from across the continent, alongside donkey welfare charities, think-tanks and academia.

The outcome of the event was the Dar es Salaam Declaration, which called for a 15-year continental moratorium on the slaughter of donkeys for their hides. The February 2024 37th African Union Summit would back their call and agree that moratorium. This was an historic moment for the protection of African biodiversity and the rural poor, women especially.

But implementation has been imperfect as it requires each member country’s laws to be changed and those laws to be implemented consistently. Progress is underway, but far from enough to save the donkey, let alone the welfare of communities who rely on their work for physical and economic mobility.

Banning trade can send it underground and across borders too. South Africa’s limits sent supply through Lesotho, where abattoir standards are lower.

Why is the trade a problem?

Firstly, because supply can’t keep up with demand.

Current demand for ejiao requires 4-5 million hides a year, far more than China’s donkey stock can supply. Donkeys are notoriously slow breeders. The gap has been filled by a poorly regulated trade drawing mainly on Africa, which holds about two-thirds of the world’s donkeys.

The effect has been that donkeys are often stolen, depriving rural households of animals essential to their livelihoods. The Donkey Sanctuary, a UK-based donkey-welfare organisation, estimates that China imports more than three million donkey hides annually, of which 25%-35% are from stolen animals.

Secondly, the issue of price is affecting communities. Donkey prices have climbed beyond what poor families can afford. In South Africa a donkey that would have fetched about US$30 in the late 2010s sold for US$125 by 2022, when the moratorium was imposed.

This has had an impact on livelihoods, especially for women and girls. Donkeys carry water, firewood and farm produce across much of arid and remote African geographies especially. Owning one saves women some five hours of labour a week and children about ten, at least. When a donkey is stolen or priced out of reach, household income, food security and schooling suffer.

The trade also breeds fear, suspicion and conflict within communities.

And it has been linked to organised crime, inhumane slaughter and biosecurity risks.

What do you hope your book can achieve?

Readers of this book will learn as much about China as they will about the epic donkey market. This is a lens through which to understand China’s economy, history and global reach. And I hope this story might contribute to saving the animal.

China, Africa and the Market for Donkeys was published by Free Press Publishers (Nairobi).

ORIGINAL STORY HERE

African Universities Can Do More Than Teach And Research: They Can Drive Social Change

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:37:55 -0700

AUTHORS:

ANNIKA SURMEIR, ADDISU LATISHEW, BONGI BAMGENI, DAVID LITTLEWOOD, GIDEON NOMDO, KASTURI BIHARI-LEAK AND PHYLLIS AWOR

African universities have significant public resources, including knowledge, skilled people, infrastructure and networks. Beyond producing graduates, how can these resources be used to address problems that people experience in their everyday lives?

This is an important question where societies face challenges like limited income opportunities, inequality and the effects of climate change, and where not everyone has a chance to go to university.

The authors of this article contributed to a recent book on how universities can contribute to social innovation and sustainable development. This piece describes the key ideas presented in their research.

What do universities have to offer?

African universities are often discussed in terms of what they lack: funding, infrastructure, research capacity or positions in global university rankings. This deficit view is rooted in colonial histories in which European educational models displaced and devalued African ways of knowing and doing. It can obscure the vital role African universities already play as agents of social innovation and sustainable development.

Our research examined how African universities can promote social innovation: new ideas, practices and collaborations that respond to social needs and contribute to wider societal change. While universities are increasingly expected to contribute to foster social innovation for sustainable development, we still know relatively little about how they do it in practice, particularly in African contexts.

Our research uses the University of Cape Town as a case study. In analysing multiple social innovations within the university as researchers, we used our decades-long experience researching and practising social innovation for sustainable development in Africa.

Our research identified three pathways through which universities can pursue social innovation: social intrapreneurship, social entrepreneurship and social extrapreneurship.

What do intrapreneurship, entrepreneurship and extrapreneurship mean?

Intrapreneurship involves working from within an existing organisation to change the organisation itself – its systems, structures, practices and ways of working. This can mean challenging whatever limits innovation and disconnects the institution from society.

In a university, intrapreneurs can be academics, professional staff or students who use their positions and university resources to drive change. They might redesign teaching so that students work on real social problems they recognise from their own lives and communities. They might widen access to university resources such as knowledge, expertise, facilities and networks. Or they might change whose knowledge is valued and how the university engages with surrounding communities. The University of Cape Town’s Centre for Higher Education Development is an example of intrapreneurship. It works to improve students’ access to and success at the university through mentoring and academic advising programmes.

Secondly, there’s social entrepreneurship. By connecting people, ideas and resources, universities can create an environment that supports the emergence of new organisations and ventures. Some of these will explicitly address social and environmental problems.

Much discussion about university entrepreneurship focuses on commercialisation through patents, spin-off companies and businesses based on university research. Social entrepreneurship expands this idea by considering how universities can spawn ventures with social impact too. Social enterprises can take on social and environmental problems. We analysed the University of Cape Town’s Solution Space as an example. It supports entrepreneurs and new ventures through training, mentoring and access to networks.

The third aspect of innovation is called social “extrapreneurship”. Many complex problems cannot be solved by a university, government, business or civil society organisation acting alone. Universities can create spaces in which these different actors meet, exchange knowledge and develop solutions together. The university becomes a connector and convenor. The Social Innovation in Health Initiative, co-founded by the University of Cape Town’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is an example. It connects researchers, innovators, health practitioners and others to develop and scale solutions to health challenges.

What’s happening on the ground?

We looked beyond formal strategies at the University of Cape Town to examine how individuals and groups were addressing societal problems.

We found that the three approaches set out above can reinforce one another. An initiative that starts inside a university can develop into an independent social enterprise. Partnerships with outside organisations can change what happens inside the university. This is possible because universities connect students, researchers, communities, governments, businesses and civil society.

But we also identified barriers. Bureaucracy, rigid structures and limited resources can make it hard to sustain social innovation. Social innovation contributes to progress by challenging established norms and practices and stimulating academics, students and entrepreneurs to experiment with novel solutions to societal problems.

The University of Cape Town is a relatively well-resourced university. Many African universities operate under much greater constraints. More research across different contexts is needed to understand how these approaches operate under different conditions.

What do you recommend?

Our findings suggest that African universities aiming to contribute to social innovation and sustainable development should:

create enabling conditions in which people can experiment with new approaches inside the institution

support innovative ideas that can be transferred to external organisations

build partnerships that connect the university across sectors and communities.

Implementing these recommendations requires navigating complex social and institutional contexts in which most African universities operate. In South Africa, this entails confronting the persistent legacy of colonialism and apartheid as well as inequalities in access, knowledge production and institutional power.

Universities cannot position themselves simply as outsiders arriving to “solve” society’s problems. Social innovation requires reciprocal relationships in which different forms of knowledge are recognised and people develop solutions together.

Social innovation also invites us to redefine the meaning of “success” in social ventures. Every failed social venture offers useful insights that can inform teaching and future entrepreneurship.

This also changes how we think about the contribution of African universities. Their value cannot be captured only through publication counts, graduate numbers or positions in international rankings. African universities can help societies understand problems, bring together people who see those problems differently, experiment with solutions and develop the people and organisations capable of carrying those solutions forward. In doing so, they can help build more humane, enterprising and sustainable societies.

READ ORGINAL STORY HERE

How Religion Collided With Race And Politics In Brazil’s Presidential Election

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:46:58 -0700

Brazilian Christians pray during a service at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ evangelical church in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 27, 2025. AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo

BY JOHN THOMAS III

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL

SCIENCE, COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

Since Brazil’s runoff elections, most attention has been focused on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s surprise upset.

The first round of voting gave a narrow lead to challenger Flávio Bolsonaro – son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now serving a 27-year sentence for efforts to overturn the 2022 election. In a Oct. 25, 2026, comeback, however, Lula won nearly 52% of votes, compared with the younger Bolsonaro’s 48%.

Yet the close results still highlight the country’s deep polarization, including religious divides, which have played an increasingly important role in its politics. According to polls before the election, Catholics were more likely to support Lula, while evangelicals staunchly backed Bolsonaro.

But Brazil’s evangelicals have diverse beliefs and identities. As a political scientist who studies Latin America, I believe the full picture of how faith shapes the country’s politics is more complicated – especially when it comes to race.

Changes in Christianity

According to the latest national census, 57% of Brazilians are Catholic and 27% are evangelical. That is a stark shift from just 30 years ago, when 8 in 10 Brazilians considered themselves Catholic and 1 in 10 were evangelical.

Beyond Christianity, 1% of Brazilians practice Candomblé or Umbanda, which draw on African religions. Two percent follow Spiritism, a movement that took root in Brazil around the turn of the 20th century. Four percent belong to other religions, and 9% have no religious affiliation.

One measure of evangelicals’ growing influence is political. Almost 1 in 5 members of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, identify as “evangelical.”

Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, helped cement his support among many evangelicals ahead of his 2018 election victory. His slogan of “God, country, family and freedom” won endorsements from key clergy. As Flávio, his son, ran in the 2026 election, he also talked about religion, such as declaring that Brazil belongs “to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

But not all evangelicals are the same. Latin Americans often consider anything Christian but not Catholic to be “evangelical.” One wing of Protestant churches in Brazil is decidedly conservative and shares characteristics with evangelical churches in the United States. However, the category also includes denominations such as Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians.

Then there are Pentecostal groups like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and The Assembly of God, Brazil’s largest non-Catholic denomination.

Survey data from ISER, a Brazilian think tank focused on religion, shows that members of Pentecostal and evangelical churches are more likely to reject Lula’s Workers’ Party than any another faith group, while practitioners of African-rooted religions are more likely to reject Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party than any other group.

Religion and race

Surveys and research also show clear political trends around race, contrary to long-standing beliefs among many Brazilians that race does not matter in their society.

Forty-five percent of Brazilians identify as Pardo, or “Brown,” referring to people with multiracial ancestry. Forty-three percent identify as white, and 10% as Black. Around 0.6% are Indigenous, and 0.4% are East Asian.

Black Brazilians are more likely to support Lula, while those identifying as white tend to support Bolsonaro, and people identifying as Brown are evenly divided.

Examining the intersection of religion and race is also important to understanding Brazil’s diversity. About half of Black Brazilians are Catholic, and nearly 1 in 3 are evangelical; in fact, within Pentecostal and evangelical churches, a majority are of African descent.

Independent Black Christian denominations did not emerge in Brazil the way they did in the U.S.; those churches’ creation was, in part, a result of segregation. However, Black groups within religious organizations have long been involved in activism to address racism and Black communities’ concerns. Despite these efforts, leadership in both Catholic and evangelical circles has remained largely white.

During the late 2010s, a new generation of activists took the helm, concerned about intolerance toward Afro-Brazilian religions and growing Christian nationalism, and some started to more vocally criticize the Bolsonaro administration. During the 2022 election, 14 evangelical organizations created a “Brazilian Black Protestant Manifesto” calling for the government to not favor any one religion, policies to address police violence against Black youth, women’s rights and other issues.

In 2025, political scientist Gladys Mitchell-Walthour and I attended the Enegrecer Conference in São Paulo, which brought together 400 Afro-Brazilian evangelical laity and clergy calling for racial justice and progress in reducing socioeconomic inequality. A key point was rapprochement with Candomblé and Umbanda, whose places of worship are often vandalized and damaged. Ivanir dos Santos, a priest or “babalawo” in the Candomblé tradition, blessed the closing service.

2026 election

Throughout the current Brazilian election cycle, religion has become a polarizing force in its own right. For example, on Instagram, one will see posts like “Real Christians don’t vote for Lula,” or “I’m Christian, and I support Lula.”

Evangelical support for Jair Bolsonaro has been a prominent feature of all recent elections. But this time, it was less unusual to see evangelicals publicly support the left – many of them Preto or Pardo.

“Christians for Democracy,” for example, a group affiliated with Lula’s party, brought together prominent Black evangelicals and Catholics on panels and held prayer rallies. The group’s Instagram page highlighted prominent leaders of Lula’s campaign who are evangelical Christians, including former Environment Minister Mariana Silva, pastor and legislator Henrique Vieira, Attorney General Jorge Mesias, legislator and former Rio de Janeiro Gov. Benedita da Silva, and André Janones. Janones, a legislator from one of Brazil’s most populous states, was the head of “Lula’s Army,” the 10 million-member WhatsApp group that was pivotal in Lula’s victory.

Lula’s victory is just one more example of how race intersects all facets of Brazilian society, including religion. I believe these durable divisions will mark Brazil’s political and religious landscape for the foreseeable future.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Congress Is Freeing Trump Of The Limited Legal Requirements Left On Him By The Supreme Court

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:07:23 -0700

Republican members of Congress stand while Democrats keep their seats during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 24, 2026. Alex Brandon/AP

BY STEPNANIE A. (SAM) MARTIN

FRANK AND BETHINE CHURCH

ENDOWED CHAIR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS,

BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY

On the evening of Oct. 11, just weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop airing taxpayer-funded television advertisements praising President Donald Trump.

Yet two of the ads continued running past the court’s deadline, including during broadcasts of “60 Minutes” and “ABC World News Tonight.”

The commercials in question aired in violation of a decades-old congressional prohibition against using federal money for unauthorized publicity and propaganda. Yet Republican congressional leaders did little to stop the president’s ad spending. That left outside organizations and a political candidate to challenge them in federal court.

The episode illustrates a larger development in Trump’s second presidency. Across disputes involving federal spending, government agencies and military operations, the administration has asserted authority that is either restricted by law or that the legislative branch has reserved for itself.

But responsibility for enforcing those limits is increasingly falling to organizations, institutions and individuals outside of the legislative branch.

As a scholar of the American presidency and deliberative democracy, I pay close attention to how the nation’s chief executive exercises power and communicates with the public.

When presidents are allowed to break rules and disregard democratic norms without consequence, I worry that citizens will grow cynical and lose faith in the idea of self-government.

As this happens, citizens may come to see the law as something that applies selectively, depending on who holds power, and lose confidence in the institutions responsible for holding their leaders accountable.

They may also begin to accept the absence of accountability as a normal feature of political life, weakening the public expectations on which democratic government depends.

Practical immunity

Congress is not the only branch of government demurring from holding the president accountable.

In July 2024, the Supreme Court provided presidents sweeping protection from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office under the “core constitutional powers” of the position.

In “Trump v. United States,” the court held that former presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for actions taken under powers the Constitution gives exclusively to the president. Along with this “absolute immunity,” the justices also granted “at least presumptive immunity” for other official acts.

In their decision, the court’s conservative majority extended the meaning of official conduct to the “outer perimeter” of presidential responsibilities and prohibited courts from examining a president’s motives when determining whether an act was official.

The ruling only addressed criminal liability and did not curtail Congress’ constitutional authority to investigate presidential conduct, control federal spending, enact statutory restrictions and, in serious cases, pursue impeachment.

Yet the Republican majority in Congress has largely declined to exercise these powers against Trump, in areas ranging from declaring war to spending money.

Their acquiescence is helping create a new form of official protection, which I call “practical immunity.” In using this term, I am borrowing from the work of scholars who study abuse in the American penal system.

Those thinkers argue that legal obstacles, institutional hesitation and political incentives sometimes make it difficult to hold public officials accountable, even when the law suggests there has been illegal conduct.

That is what appears to be increasingly happening now with Congress, the courts and the president.

When Congress stops defending its laws

The television ads case illustrates the conundrum of practical immunity.

In opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration’s attorneys did not contest the argument asserted by the plaintiffs – Common Cause and two unions – that the expenditures violated federal appropriations law. Instead, they said the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. They also argued that the case was moot because the advertising campaign was ending.

Those arguments failed in court. Yet the administration’s defense demonstrated how elusive enforcing a law can be when Congress fails to assert its constitutionally granted role, even when the underlying legal restriction is clear. To win, a plaintiff must establish a concrete injury and persuade a judge to intervene. While this happens, the disputed conduct often continues.

In this case, the president went on spending public money in violation of the law. The GOP-led Congress, meanwhile, remained silent, even though its own role was being usurped.

Another boundary that Trump has repeatedly tested is the so-called “power of the purse”, which is among the legislative branch’s most important constitutional responsibilities. Presidents may spend federal money only for purposes Congress has authorized. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 protects lawmakers’ decisions against presidential efforts to ignore congressional appropriations.

In September 2026, Trump’s administration canceled more than US$800 million in congressionally approved spending for immigrant services, climate change and civil rights for minority groups. The cancellation was done through a maneuver known as a pocket rescission. The administration timed its action to make it difficult for Congress to consider or stop the rescission. The Government Accountability Office – an independent agency that examines how taxpayer dollars are spent – said tactics like these violate federal law.

When this happened, a few members of Congress tried to intervene and stop the rescission, but the Republican majority blocked their efforts.

The collapse of institutional rivalry

The separation of powers divides authority among the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government to prevent too much power from becoming concentrated in any one place.

The architects of the Constitution anticipated that officials in different branches would compete to preserve their authority. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison argued that maintaining the balance established by the separation of powers depended on the ambitions of public officials coming into conflict. Members of Congress could be expected to resist presidential encroachments because those encroachments diminished their own power.

Fierce partisanship has complicated this arrangement.

Legal scholars Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes have shown how political competition mostly now happens inside and between parties, rather than among branches of government. When one party controls Congress and the presidency, legislators may become more invested in advancing their party’s agenda than they are in defending their institution’s constitutional authority.

Trump’s influence over Republican voters intensifies these incentives. Lawmakers who oppose him risk public ridicule, primary challenges and diminished political support. Defending congressional authority may therefore carry greater immediate – and personal – political costs than allowing presidential power to expand.

The result is a political system in which a president can act in ways that may violate federal law, undermine democratic norms and encroach on Congress’ constitutional authority.

Madison’s constitutional design assumed that public officials would defend the powers entrusted to them. The danger to the American constitutional system emerging in Trump’s second term is that congressional leaders have begun to regard those powers as expendable, allowing the president to exercise authority under conditions of practical immunity. He faces little fear of meaningful institutional consequences.

RDEAD ORIGINAL STORY HERE

What Gets Fact‑Checked? How Politics Shapes The Answer In Four African Countries

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 19:22:09 -0700

Millions of Africans get their news on mobile phones, often in closed WhatsApp groups where false claims can travel fast. Rutvik Patel/Unsplash

AUTHORS:

CHIKEZIE E. UZUEGBUNAM

SENIOR LECTURER IN MEDIA AND

DIGITAL STUDIES AND DEPUTY HEAD

OF SCHOOL, RHODES UNIVERSITY

CHINEDU RICHARD ONONIWU

LECTURER, DEPARTMENT OF

BROADCASTING, NNAMDI AZIKIWE

UNIVERSITY

MASAKI MAGACK

TEACHING ASSOCIATE IN COMMUNICATION,

CULTURE & MEDIA STUDIES, HOWARD

UNIVERSITY

Every couple of years, the same false stories come back. A claim that an election was rigged before a single vote was cast. An old video of violence, stripped of its date and place, presented as breaking news.

For fact-checkers, this means repeatedly investigating claims they have already debunked, even as new false stories emerge. The work takes time, resources and access to reliable information, which aren’t easily available.

Fact-checkers are the people whose job is to track claims, test them against evidence and tell the public what is true. As of June 2025, there were about 450 fact-checking organisations in more than 100 countries, including several African ones. Fact-checkers work within fact-checking organisations and in newsrooms with fact-checking desks.

In Africa, millions of people now get their news on mobile phones, often in closed WhatsApp groups where false claims travel quietly and fast. And around elections, false claims about rigging and ethnically charged propaganda can raise tensions.

We are scholars interested in the growing impact of information disorders, such as misinformation and disinformation. Previous studies have examined how false information affects democracy and wider society. But less attention has been paid to the people working to combat it: fact-checkers. In a recent study, we set out to understand how fact-checkers in different African countries see their role and the challenges they face.

Our study covered Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. We chose these four countries because they represent the range of political systems found in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cameroon is officially a democracy, but in practice it has an authoritarian government. Kenya and Nigeria are often described as hybrid systems, where elections and constitutional rights exist alongside heavy-handed state power. South Africa has a constitution that protects press freedom, and that freedom is generally respected.

We found that the political environment in the four African countries shapes not only what fact-checkers can do, but what they believe their job is.

In a repressive system, fact-checking can shrink into checking celebrity rumours. In more open systems, it can grow into a public service that combines verification, education and accountability and bolster democratic resilience among citizens.

Across all four countries, we also found that many fact-checkers are moving away from simply declaring claims as true or false. They are trying to help people judge information for themselves, including through “prebunking”. This is a proactive way of informing and warning people about common tricks before they encounter them.

What we found

Our team carried out in-depth interviews with 19 professional fact-checkers between January and August 2025. Five were from Cameroon, five from Kenya, five from Nigeria and four from South Africa. This provided in-depth insights into how fact-checkers think about their work and why. We didn’t set out to measure how common a particular view is across a whole population.

We chose experienced practitioners who could speak with authority. We included those working for fact-checking organisations and those in newsrooms.

The clearest finding was that there is no single “African fact-checker”. How these professionals see themselves depends heavily on the political system they work in.

Cameroon: checking what is safe to check

Cameroonian fact-checkers said their main job was to debunk false claims spreading online. But they admitted that they mostly stayed away from politics. The reason was fear. One respondent said:

We avoid fact-checking government authorities. It is a risky enterprise to do that.

Instead they checked claims about fires, road accidents, armed robberies, the death of a public figure, or rumours about footballers, musicians and influencers.

This is a form of self-censorship. It limits what fact-checking can do. Fear also makes the work harder to do well. Good fact-checking depends on showing the public your evidence and your sources. But in Cameroon, officials rarely cooperate, and eyewitnesses are often too afraid to speak.

Kenya: fact-checkers as democratic guides

Kenyan fact-checkers described a much broader role. They saw themselves as helping people take part in democracy, settling public disputes about facts, holding leaders accountable and guiding citizens through an overload of online information.

One organisation has set up channels where people can send in viral photos or memes for checking. Mainstream newsrooms are also bringing in specialists to train journalists to trace texts, images and videos back to their original sources before publishing.

Kenyan fact-checkers also described organised disinformation campaigns by both government-aligned and opposition groups, which leave ordinary people “at a crossroads” about whom to believe.

They also reported harassment and intimidation. And many politicians and officials ignore requests to respond to viral claims, some because they believe the media is against them.

Nigeria: two different ideas of the job

In Nigeria, we found a split. Newer fact-checkers, and those working inside newsrooms, tended to see fact-checking as one task within journalism. One said:

My job is mostly verifying viral claims before publication. I still consider myself primarily a journalist.

Senior fact-checkers saw something much bigger. For them, the job includes teaching the public, tracking how false stories spread over time and preventing real-world harm. As one put it:

What we are essentially going for is information integrity and helping people to develop media literacy.

But they also described serious pressure.

Once a claim touches politics or security, you start receiving warnings, sometimes framed as ‘friendly advice’ but clearly meant to intimidate.

Another said cybercrime and defamation laws were often used to threaten legal action, even when reports were based on evidence.

Money was a constant worry, too.

We are chasing misinformation that spreads in minutes with resources that barely sustain daily operations.

South Africa: filling the gaps newsrooms leave

South African fact-checkers saw themselves as a complement to struggling newsrooms. One said:

We are doing the job that everyone wants or might be doing but doesn’t have the time or the resources to really get into.

They train journalists, students and community groups, and publish through partnerships with media outlets, radio and social media platforms such as TikTok.

This surprised us. Given South Africa’s relatively strong press freedom, we expected fact-checkers here to focus heavily on holding politicians to account. Instead, their main concerns were less about the state and more about the public.

They also spoke about the limits of reacting after a claim has spread:

When you wait for a claim to go viral and then you respond to it, much of the damage has already been done.

And few people want to read a 1,000-word explanation of why a claim is wrong.
What next

Fact-checkers face different challenges, but they all need greater protection, resources and public trust to do their work effectively.

This means that governments should stop misusing the law to intimidate fact-checkers, and public officials should respond to requests for comment. Checking facts is not an attack on the state.

Funders and technology companies should offer long-term support, while newsrooms and fact-checking organisations can strengthen their work through closer collaboration.

Media literacy should be taught in schools, and fact-checkers can reach wider audiences through local languages, radio and shorter formats.

However, there is no single approach that will work across Africa. Solutions must reflect local political realities and support those working, often at personal risk, to counter false information.

Christian Nounkeu Tatchou contributed to this article.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Health Progress In Africa Leaves More People Living With Disabilities: Rehabilitation Is The Next Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 20:21:17 -0700

BY UKACHUKWU ABARAOGU

DENIOR LECTURER PUBLIC HEALTH,

EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS & REHABILKITATION,

UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF SCOTLAND

Conversations around health progress in Africa usually focus on lives saved. And rightly so. Across the continent, people are living longer than they did a generation ago. Advances in prevention, treatment and public health have reduced deaths from many major diseases and improved survival for millions. But there is another side to this success story that receives far less attention: quality of life.

As a physiotherapist and rehabilitation researcher, I am interested not only in whether people survive illness, but also in how they live afterwards. The latest findings from the Global Burden of Disease 2023 study, to which I contributed, suggest that while mortality is falling, the number of people living with disability and chronic health conditions that affect everyday functioning is rising.

The study shows that globally, healthy life expectancy at birth increased from 61.1 years in 2010 to 63.1 years in 2023. But the gap between living longer and living healthier is widening. Globally, years lived with disability rose from 786 million to 990 million between 2010 and 2023. These numbers suggest that many people are spending more years living with the consequences of disease and injury. In many African countries, this is occurring alongside a growing burden of noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Health systems have become increasingly effective at reducing mortality, but they have not expanded rehabilitation services at the same pace. Many health systems are still poorly equipped to help people live well after illness or injury. This matters because health is about more than survival. It is also about whether people can move, work, learn, care for their families and participate fully in their communities. And that is where rehabilitation has a crucial role to play.

Rehabilitation can help people recover after illness or injury, maintain independence and participate fully in society. Yet it remains overlooked in many health systems.

To address this growing challenge, governments, health systems and development partners need to make rehabilitation a core part of healthcare rather than an afterthought. This means integrating rehabilitation into primary care, expanding the rehabilitation workforce and ensuring that services are available in communities, where people live and work.

Looking beyond deaths

To understand what is happening to population health in Africa, I worked with colleagues from around the world as part of the Global Burden of Disease 2023 study, one of the largest and most comprehensive health research collaborations ever undertaken.

The latest studies examined trends in life expectancy, causes of death and disability across the world. This provides one of the clearest pictures yet of how health is changing in Africa.

I was particularly interested in the findings related to disability. Public health discussions often focus on reducing mortality. But surviving a health condition does not necessarily mean returning to full health. The studies show that although life expectancy is improving across much of sub-Saharan Africa, the amount of time people spend living with disability is also increasing. These trends are increasingly visible in sub-Saharan Africa, where long-term conditions such as heart disease and diabetes are becoming more common.

Several forces are driving this trend. More people are surviving conditions such as HIV, tuberculosis and neonatal complications. At the same time, population growth, ageing and the rising prevalence of noncommunicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease, diabetes and musculoskeletal disorders mean that more people are living with conditions that affect their functioning.

From a rehabilitation perspective, this is a critical finding. It suggests that Africa’s health systems are increasingly caring for people who need support not only to survive, but also to maintain independence, mobility, communication and participation in everyday life. This growing need for rehabilitation is one of the most important, yet least recognised public health challenges emerging from the latest global health evidence.

What the findings tell us

What stood out most to me was not simply that disability is increasing, but why it is increasing.

For many years, policymakers, researchers and development organisations often viewed disability in Africa primarily as a consequence of weak health systems. The underlying assumption in many policy and public health discussions was that if healthcare improved, disability would naturally decline. The Global Burden of Disease 2023 findings tell a more complex story. In many cases, rising disability is linked to health system success. More people now survive conditions that were once fatal.

But survival often comes with consequences that can last for years or even a lifetime. The studies show that noncommunicable diseases are becoming a larger contributor to health loss across sub-Saharan Africa. Someone who survives a stroke, for example, may live for many years afterwards but continue to experience weakness, mobility difficulties or communication problems that require ongoing rehabilitation and support. At the same time, injuries remain a major cause of long-term disability, particularly among younger adults.

Improvements in survival from infectious diseases also mean more people are living with chronic health needs.

The way forward

Governments and development partners can change the lack of rehabilitation capabilities by integrating rehabilitation into primary healthcare, investing in workforce development and expanding access to community-based services.

Africa’s health gains over recent decades are worth celebrating. But success should not be measured only by lives saved. It should also be measured by whether people can live well after survival.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Africans Reuse, Repair, Recycle And Resell Waste: What’s Needed To Build On The Circular Economy Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 18:34:10 -0700

Mark Oluoch, a worker with Kenya’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Centre, sorts electronic waste for recycling. James Wakibia/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

BY MICHAEL ODEI ERDIAW-KWASIE, AMILA UDAGE AND MATHEW ABUNYEWAH

In many African cities, a broken fridge is rarely thrown away immediately. It may be repaired and resold, dismantled for spare parts or collected for its metal components.

Old clothes are often altered or transformed into something new. Leftover crop stalks and leaves are turned into animal feed, compost, cooking fuel or biogas.

These activities are often driven by need. Incomes are limited and it’s expensive to replace appliances or worn out clothes. Sometimes recycling also happens because of unreliable waste collection.

These are also examples of a circular economy. This is where products and materials are kept in use for as long as possible. It’s the opposite of a system where resources are extracted from nature and turned into goods that are sold, used and eventually thrown away.

We are circular economy specialists who look at how recycling and repair practices are already part of everyday economic activity across Africa. Our aim is to find ways for policymakers to take small projects and scale them up.

In our latest research, we looked at policies and examples from African countries to find out how circular economy practices are taking off on the continent.

Our research found that circular economies aren’t happening everywhere. Thirty-four African countries have banned plastic bags to some degree. Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco have set up facilities to recycle e-waste (discarded electronic devices). They’ve also set up projects that turn waste into energy. Kenya has rules that make manufacturers responsible for collecting and recycling their products after people finish using them.

Somalia, Sudan and Congo, however, still depend heavily on a system in which products are made, used and discarded.

Africa’s circular economy has been discussed by governments, businesses, development agencies and international organisations as if it needs to be based on an imported model of formal waste-management systems and high-tech recycling.

These approaches may have a role, but repairers, reclaimers (also known as waste pickers), farmers and small businesses across Africa are already repairing, reusing, reselling, sharing, recovering materials and converting organic waste into productive resources.

In other words, circular practices are already embedded in everyday economic activity in African countries. The priority is therefore not to replace these practices. What’s needed is to recognise and improve them, and find ways to make them happen on a bigger scale. This means giving local businesses and communities the finance, infrastructure, skills and supportive policies they need to expand what is already working.

Progress is possible but uneven

Our research found that several African countries have introduced policies and initiatives supporting aspects of a circular economy. For example, Rwanda has acted against plastic pollution and developed facilities for processing electronic waste.

South Africa has come up with rules for producers of goods to help manage and pay for their products even after selling them. These rules compel producers to support collection, reuse and recycling. This keeps materials in circulation and reduces waste.

Kenya has taken significant measures against single use plastic bags. In Ghana, the National Plastic Action Partnership brings together government, business and civil society. Nigeria is developing a national circular economy roadmap. Nigerian groups like Wecyclers have connected informal collectors with recycling markets.

Greater opportunities exist across agriculture and food systems, manufacturing, energy, and water and sanitation.

However, a policy on paper does not automatically produce an effective system. Waste collection remains inadequate in many African cities. There aren’t many recycling facilities on the continent. Local authorities often lack the funds, equipment and technical capacity to enforce regulations. Political instability and unreliable electricity supplies can make long term investment in circular economy projects difficult.

What needs to happen next

Africa’s move towards a circular economy must start with the basics: collecting waste, sorting it properly and disposing of it safely. As our research found, expensive technologies will not work well if waste is never collected or is too contaminated to recycle.

The African Union’s Continental Circular Economy Action Plan has some useful ideas on this. But its success will depend on how well it is put into practice in local communities. For many countries, improving everyday waste services should come before investing in high-tech solutions.

Informal workers including reclaimers, repairers and second-hand traders are already central to Africa’s circular economy. They should be supported by governments. They need training, safer working conditions, facilities to work in, fair compensation and social protection. Including these workers in formal circular economy systems, while protecting their livelihoods, can help build a more inclusive and effective circular economy.

The success of circular economy policies should be judged on more than how much waste is kept out of rubbish dumps. Policymakers need to make sure that people benefit from the circular economy. Working conditions of recyclers should improve, recovered products must be affordable and local recycling enterprises must remain viable.

Africa’s circular economy will emerge strongly if governments, businesses, communities, researchers and informal workers work together. The foundations of a circular economy already exist. African countries have a strong culture of repairing and reusing goods. Local experts and entrepreneurs who turn discarded materials into value are valued. The task now is to support these efforts without destroying the social and economic systems that sustain them.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

US Inequality Is Getting Worse In Ways You Might Not Expect

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:02:23 -0700

Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, pictured here at President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, have seen their wealth soar thanks to the stock market boom and beneficial tax changes. Chip Somodevilla/Pool Photo via AP

BY MARKUS SCHNEIDER

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS,

UNIVERSITY OF DENVER

The buzzword of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections may be affordability, but growing anger over inequality is behind the sentiment.

A Pew Research survey released in October 2026 found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans – including 4 in 10 Republicans – believe there’s too much inequality in the U.S. And a growing share from both major political parties state that the economy needs to be fundamentally rebuilt to address this.

This sentiment has, however, been difficult to convert into political results. Public support for California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires has been waning ahead of the midterms, for example, and in 2025, Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping legislation that included tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting safety net programs.

I’m an economist who has been studying inequality for about two decades. My research confirms the trend of rising inequality since 1980, driven by the wealthiest pulling away not just from the middle class, but also from the “merely wealthy.” Overall, recent research underscores how policy choices – including taxation and public spending – enabled this 40-year rise in inequality.

Some policies enacted more recently appear to be accelerating this trend. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research organization, concluded that policy changes since the start of 2025 have imposed higher costs on everyone except the top 1%.

Inequality by the numbers

Recent federal data shows that wealth inequality continues to grow. The top 1% saw their share of wealth increase from 31.7% to 32.5% just between the first and second quarters of 2026, a jump of over $8.5 trillion. That caps a steady climb from 30.9% in the last quarter of 2024 – and from 27.4% in 1999.

These recent gains come at the expense of the middle class – the 40% between the bottom half and the top 10% – who hold only 28.8% of all wealth despite being a group that’s 40 times larger than the top 1%. And the middle’s share is shrinking, down from 32.9% in 1999 and 30.2% at the end of 2024, according to the data.

But the ultra-wealthy, those in the top 0.1%, are pulling away even from the rest of the rich, the data shows. This tiny elite owns 15% of all wealth – almost half of all the wealth of the top 1%. Both the top 0.1% and the next 0.9% saw their share of wealth increase, but the top 0.1% captured two-thirds of the gains between the first and second quarters of 2026.

Even within the highest echelons of wealth concentration, these two groups are on different trajectories.

Crucially, the wealth of the top 0.1% is disproportionately boosted by corporate profits, which are up sharply overall. The top 0.1% reap the most from this growth because their portfolios’ value has soared on the promise of future increased profitability that’s driving up stock prices – especially thanks to the tech and artificial intelligence boom.

How taxes play a role

Since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s, the U.S. tax code has become less and less progressive, often through policy changes supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

The common argument for tax cuts is that they stimulate growth, but a growing body of research – including international studies – doesn’t back that up. A 2025 Brookings report notes that U.S. tax policy has gone through massive changes throughout history without any discernible effect on growth.

Nonetheless, congressional Republicans used their narrow majorities in 2025 to pass Trump’s sweeping policy and tax bill, which included provisions making most of his 2017 tax cuts permanent. Those included the historically low top-income tax rate and the lowest corporate tax rate since 1940.

It’s also important to understand that the top 0.1% have a different tax exposure from the rest of the top 1% because the composition of their wealth is different. They own as much in stocks and mutual funds as the next 0.9%, a group that is nine times larger, and those holdings are where most of their recent gains came from.

Furthermore, roughly three-quarters of the top 0.1%’s wealth portfolio consists of corporate and business ownership, allowing them to benefit from the Trump tax cuts in multiple ways – including lower tax rates and more opportunities to defer or avoid tax liability. Their massive holdings of stock mean that they can borrow against it for cash, usually tax-free, rather than having to sell shares.

By contrast, below that elite, real estate is a much more important component of wealth, while corporate equity is a smaller and smaller share. For the middle class, nearly two-thirds of wealth is held in their homes and retirement savings, while corporate and business ownership accounts for only 15%.

The new drivers of inequality

Much of the inequality debate focuses on the role that taxation has played. But other recent policy changes have shifted different kinds of costs on to low- and middle-income earners, while leaving the wealthy relatively unscathed.

One example is a provision in Trump’s 2025 legislation that allowed federal healthcare subsidies through the Affordable Car Act to lapse. Insurers and analysts expect the number of people signing up for coverage through ACA plans to drop by about 5 million due to higher premiums and face much higher out-of-pocket costs.

The spike in energy costs, including gasoline, diesel and heating oil, is another case in point. They disproportionately affect low- and middle-income consumers but barely dent the budgets of the wealthy – while boosting the profits of companies engaged to the extraction, processing and transportation of oil. This divergence has been especially pronounced since the start of the conflict with Iran in February 2026, which has pushed up the global price of oil.

Then there are tariffs, which are fundamentally a consumption tax on imports. Economists at the New York Federal Reserve have found that these levies have inflicted a heavy hit on many common consumer goods. They estimated that prices for these items, which make up a much larger share of household budgets among the nonwealthy, would have fallen on average by 1% over the year without the tariffs. Instead, they have risen by 2.9%.

This acceleration in the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very top, in short, has an array of drivers. But they’re not inexorable forces of history. As economist Thomas Piketty put it in “A Brief History of Equality,” published in 2022: “Inequality is first of all a social, historical, and political construction.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

RELAED TOPICS:

Inequality Has Risen From 1970 To Trump − That Has 3 Hidden Costs That Undermine Democracy

Why Inequality Is Growing In The US And Around The World

Blood Pressure Rising: Over 50% Of Nigerians We Tested Had Hypertension And Over 65% Didn’t Know It

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:43:47 -0700

Medical screening. Emmanuel Osodi/Majority World/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

BY AMAM MBAWKEM

PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE,

UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS

Hypertension – persistent high blood pressure – is one of the biggest contributors to strokes, heart failure and cardiac arrests. It claims more than 10 million lives every year worldwide. But it’s a largely treatable condition, manageable with relatively cheap medication and simple lifestyle changes.

That’s why detecting it early is so worthwhile.

In Nigeria, the burden of hypertension has been climbing for years. According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence of hypertension among Nigerian adults is about 36%.

The scale of the challenge became clearer when our team of cardiologists set up blood pressure testing stations in Lagos for three months in 2023. We set them up in hospitals, pharmacies, workplaces and public spaces across the city and tested as many as 1,500 adults who were passing us. The results were concerning.

Our findings show that 52.5% of those who tested had hypertension, and of those with hypertension, 65.3% had no idea their blood pressure was high. The care gap ran even deeper. Only 13.8% of the people we identified as hypertensive were taking medication for their condition, and just 8.3% had their blood pressure under control. Hypertension is blood pressure at 140/90 mmHg or above.

In a city of more than 20 million people, this meant that millions could be walking around unaware that they are living with a serious medical condition or not getting the care they need for it.

If Nigeria could reach the modest target of just 50% hypertension control, called for by the WHO and World Heart Federation, at least 75 million deaths globally might be prevented before 2050.

However, as our findings show, the first hurdle is to improve people’s awareness of their condition. Screening is central to this. If we can’t find the condition, we can’t treat it, especially in the early stages when a change of habits can still make a real difference.

Our findings underscore the need for sustained mass screening, improved access to affordable anti-hypertensive therapy, and stronger health systems to ensure that patients are not lost between diagnosis, treatment and successfully controlling their condition.

From awareness to action

Worldwide, fewer than one in five people with hypertension have their blood pressure controlled. Our study shows some of the reasons for this.

When we interviewed participants in Lagos, 57.3% reported that they had to pay the full cost of their medication themselves, and more than one in five said that they only took their tablets when they felt they needed them.

When medication becomes a financial consideration, and when a month of pills competes with school fees or transport, it’s little surprise that adherence rates drop.

To an extent this is also a question of understanding and awareness. Of those on treatment, 64.6% said they took their medication regularly, while 22.4% took their tablets only when they felt they needed them, despite this being against clinical recommendations.

Adherence and prevalence partially reflects education levels. People with no formal schooling were around two and a half times more likely to fall into a higher blood pressure category.

Solutions

Most of what is needed already exists, and none of it is expensive. The medicines and the protocols already exist, set out in the World Health Organization’s HEARTS package. What has to change is where the care happens.

Nurses and primary healthcare workers can measure blood pressure, start treatment under protocol, refill prescriptions and spot the red flags that mean a patient should be referred, leaving the tertiary centres to handle the complications. Adding hypertension to a system that already exists costs far less than building a new one.

Awareness and prevention are key to improving Nigeria’s heart health. If a patient reaches me in a hospital, the system has already failed them. For what it costs to treat one heart attack, we could manage the risk factors of a great many people long before they ever need a cardiologist.

Next steps

Nigeria was at the centre of the 2026 World Heart Day activities. The World Heart Federation partnered with the Nigerian Cardiac Society on a two-day conference in Abuja, including a secondary school debate and arts competition, a community walk, health screenings and CPR training (cardiopulmonary resuscitation).

The Nigerian Heart Foundation, CHDf Nigeria, and regional chapters of the Nigerian Cardiac Society are also running grassroots events elsewhere in the country, with a focus on improving awareness and providing community health services.

The World Heart Federation’s members around the world can only do so much, however. Systemic action is needed to tackle what is a global issue.

What is missing in Lagos, and across much of sub-Saharan Africa, is two-fold: access to screening, and access to treatment if hypertension is found. This is where systemic change is needed. Nigeria needs integrated health systems which reduce out-of-pocket costs, embed routine checks into primary care, and enable community health workers to screen, refer and follow up with patients.

There are proven and off-patent medications to control blood pressure. These should be made available at a reasonable cost.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Murder Of Black Suffrage Leader Octavius Catto Reveals Why Election Day 1871 Was One Of The Most Violent In Philadelphia History

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:17:06 -0700

A 12-foot bronze statue of Octavius Catto was installed outside Philadelphia’s City Hall in 2017. Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images

BY TIMOTHY WEKLBECK

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR

ANTI-RACISM, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

Octavius Valentine Catto died as he lived, advocating for a more equitable society. Accordingly, the city of Philadelphia has decided to honor his legacy – again.

Philadelphia previously honored Catto with a commemorative statue outside City Hall in 2017. Of the city’s 1,500 public statues, it was the first to honor an individual Black person.

On Oct. 8, 2026, the intersection of 8th and South streets was formally renamed Octavius Catto Way. This is where Catto was assassinated 155 years ago during a tumultuous Election Day in 1871.

Speaking at the renaming ceremony, NAACP Philadelphia Branch President Catherine Hicks said the moment was about ensuring Catto’s legacy was remembered and understood.

As a civil rights lawyer and professor in the Africology and African American Studies department at Temple University, I find Catto’s activism immensely important. I hope more Philadelphians are encouraged to learn about Octavius Catto, the man former Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney described as the “Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks of his day.”

A teacher, baseball player and civil rights leader

Octavius Catto was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1839 to a free Black woman named Sarah Isabella Cain and a formerly enslaved man named William Catto, who purchased his freedom and later became a Presbyterian minister.

William Catto brought his family north to Baltimore with plans to eventually travel to Liberia as missionaries. William Catto had to adjust his plans when members of Charleston’s Presbyterian leadership discovered a letter he had written they believed would incite an insurrection among enslaved people. They alleged the letter would “excite discontent and insurrection among the slaves.” An arrest warrant was issued for William and Sarah. They fled Baltimore and later settled in Philadelphia. There, William Catto would become an abolitionist, which had a profound influence on his son Octavius.

Octavius Catto spent his formative years and subsequently launched his career as a public servant in Philadelphia. He attended the Institute for Colored Youth – now Cheyney University – and graduated at the top of his class in 1858.

The next year, he started teaching English and mathematics at the institute. By his early 30s, Catto had worked with Frederick Douglass to recruit all-Black regiments to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War. He co-founded, managed and played for an all-Black baseball team, the Philadelphian Pythians baseball club. He also worked with other civil rights leaders like Lucretia Mott and his fiancé, Caroline LeCount, to desegregate Philadelphia’s horse-drawn streetcars and the Franklin Institute.

The fight for Black suffrage in Philadelphia

More than a century before the civil rights protests erupted in Selma and Birmingham, Octavius Catto led desegregation efforts and voting rights campaigns in Philadelphia in the 1860s. The New York Times covered some of his desegregation efforts in 1867.

His civil rights advocacy was met with violent opposition, especially after the ratification of the 15th Amendment in February of 1870. The 15th Amendment guaranteed voting rights for citizens regardless of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Legal scholars such as Travis Crum argue the 15th Amendment “re-founded the United States as a multiracial democracy.” It gave the federal government key enforcement powers that prior legislative acts that secured the right to vote – such as the First Reconstruction Act – did not have.

In 1780, nine decades before Catto’s murder, the Pennsylvania General Assembly had passed the Act of Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which set the conditions freeing Pennsylvania’s enslaved people. It was the first legislation of its kind in America.

Despite these provisions, varying interpretations of Pennsylvania’s Constitution of 1776 left it unclear whether Black men could vote without restriction. The state Constitution restricted the vote to freemen, which it defined as “of full age of twenty-one years, having resided in this State for one whole year before the day of election … and paid public taxes during that time.”

Sixty-two years later, the state made it painfully clear who it intended to allow to vote. In 1838, Pennsylvania’s Constitution explicitly restricted the right to vote to “white freemen.”

Philadelphia became a key location for the fight for suffrage and other pivotal civil rights. The city had a large Black population, a storied history of abolition and an abundance of Black institutions, yet racial discrimination was still endemic.

Targeted by white supremacists

Election Day of 1871 was one of the most consequential in the history of Philadelphia, at the time an epicenter for the simmering tensions surrounding Black suffrage. According to W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Philadelphia Negro,” about 5,500 Black men were eligible to vote in 1870. The prospect of Black men voting in the election sparked violent outrage in the city.

Both city officials and private citizens engaged in targeted violence to intimidate Black voters. Armed mobs harassed Black neighborhoods, attacked residents and forcibly closed polling locations.

Four Black Philadelphians – Levi Bolden, Isaac Chase, Jacob Gordon and Moses Wright – died during the coordinated racial violence that occurred that day and the evening before. It all left many of the city’s Black residents “considerably frightened,” according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report. Catto became a fifth victim.

Around 3:30 p.m., Catto was standing near his Philadelphia home when Frank Kelly, a political operative who opposed Black suffrage, fatally shot him.

Catto’s impassioned advocacy had made him a target of white supremacists in the region, but he did not waver in the face of this growing danger. In speaking of Catto’s legacy, Du Bois wrote, “And so closed the career of a man of splendid equipment, rare force of character, whose life was so interwoven with all that was good about us, as to make it stand out in bold relief, as a pattern for those who have followed after.”

Dedicated to empowering Black Philadelphians

Philadelphia Martyrs Day is an annual observance that pays homage to the five Philadelphia men who fought for Black suffrage and were killed in the 1871 election. These memorials often emphasize Catto because of his civil rights and voting rights advocacy.

Despite this and the statue outside City Hall, I and others in Philadelphia believe Catto’s influence remains largely unsung. In describing the importance of the street renaming, Leland Morroccos, executive director of It’s the Little Things Foundation, a local civic engagement and community advocacy organization, said, “Octavius Valentine Catto deserves to be remembered not simply as a name in Philadelphia’s history, but as a man who devoted his life to educating, organizing and empowering Black Philadelphians to participate fully in the civic life of their city and their country.”

“Philadelphia should forever remember Octavius V. Catto,” Morroccos continued, “not only for how he died, but for how he lived, what he believed, and the doors he worked to open for others.”

I hope all who stroll along Octavius Catto Way will come to learn that too.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Who Is Navi Pillay, The South African Jjudge Who Won The Nobel Prize? We Asked Her Biographer

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:02:09 -0700

Sam Naidu (right) interviews Navi Pillay at the United Nations in Geneva. Image courtesy Sam Naidu

BY SAM NAIDU

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF LITERARY

STUDIES IN ENGLISH, RHODES

UNIVERSITY

International human rights judge Navi Pillay was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. She was honoured for her lifelong dedication to international law and global justice.

To understand more about Pillay and her work, we spoke with Sam Naidu, a feminist and literary scholar with a focus on crime and justice, and the author of a biography of Pillay.

You travelled to Switzerland to interview Pillay in 2009. What lasting impression did she leave?

In the biography, I describe Pillay as a down-to-earth, no-nonsense kind of person with a wicked sense of humour. She was generous with her time and answered all my questions frankly. She exudes strength, integrity and a keen intelligence.

Besides her colleagues at the United Nations (UN), I also spoke with family, friends and former colleagues of hers in South Africa, where I was granted access to her personal archives.

We hail from the same Indian diasporic community in Durban, and I could relate to her life story. As a feminist scholar I chose her as the subject of a book because she was an inspirational black woman who overcame structural barriers to become a pioneer in human rights law, with a global impact.

We had communicated before my trip, but when I arrived in Geneva and she saw me for the first time, she joked, “Ah, but you are only a young one. I was expecting an old person like me.”

Under the warmth and good humour, I detected a steely grit that no foe to justice and no obstacle to human rights can quell. As her stance in response to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu testifies, this grit seems to have strengthened over time.

Who is Navi Pillay?

I would say that Navi Pillay is an extraordinary woman whose exemplary life has its origins in one of the darkest moments in the annals of human rights and the law. Perhaps her strength lies partly in this provenance.

She was born Navanethem Pillay, with Tamil ancestry. Her grandparents were indentured labourers who arrived in South Africa from India by ship in the late 19th century, a time of British colonialism. They were brought to today’s KwaZulu-Natal province, to work on the sugarcane fields. She was born in 1941 and grew up in a working class home in Clairwood, a suburb of Durban, the fifth of eight children. Her father was a bus driver who earned extra money from fishing. Despite the family’s lack of resources, the value of education was stressed in the Pillay household.

This was a time of white minority rule under a racialised system of separate development. Apartheid was formalised in law in 1948, when Pillay was seven. Black South Africans were given minimal education opportunities, but her school principal recognised her academic smarts and her community helped raise the money for her to attend university to study law. She went on to complete a master’s degree in law and then a doctorate in juridical science at Harvard University.

A staunch anti-apartheid activist, in 1967 she was the first black woman in the country to set up a law practice. One of her earliest cases as her own boss was to defend African National Congress member Phyllis Naidoo, who was under banning orders as a member of the resistance. In 1973 Pillay obtained legal representation for political prisoners at Robben Island prison and, in 1986, co-founded the Advice Desk for Abused Women (now Advice Desk for the Abused).

The struggle against formal apartheid finally ended in 1994, with South Africa’s first democratic elections. In 1995, Pillay was recommended by former president Nelson Mandela as the first black female judge in the Supreme Court. She joined the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the same year and in 1999 was promoted as the tribunal’s judge president. She then moved to the International Criminal Court in Hague, after which, in 2008, she was appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a most fitting acknowledgment. Whether defending political prisoners in South Africa, transforming international criminal law by tackling rape in Rwanda, or denouncing the genocide in Gaza, she has been a fearless trailblazer in the area of human rights since the 1960s.

In August 2009 Forbes Magazine published its list of the world’s 100 most powerful women. At number 64, Navi Pillay was the second African ever to make the list.

She began her career fighting for human rights and justice in apartheid South Africa, but today she speaks for victims everywhere.

As a feminist scholar, you explore crime and violence against women. How did Pillay’s judgments about rape help shape global justice?

Pillay’s interventions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda changed international human rights law forever. The tribunal became the first court to hold that sexual violence can be an act of genocide. Pillay sat on the bench that presided over the landmark case.

On 30 May 1996, Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of Taba, a commune in Rwanda, was brought before Trial Chamber I. Fifteen charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions were brought against him. He pleaded not guilty.

During the trial several of the victim-witnesses recounted acts of sexual violence perpetrated against them. But Akayesu was not being charged with sexual violence offences. Faced with this conundrum, Pillay posed a question to the office of the prosecutor:

What are the judges expected to do with the evidence of sexual violence in a trial where there are no charges relating to sexual violence and the main charge is genocide?

As a direct result, the prosecution filed an indictment which later led to the finding that rape may under certain circumstances constitute genocide.

Subsequently, this provision was incorporated into the leading modern instruments of international criminal law. There has rarely been a feminist victory with more real, material impact. As Pillay said:

From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime.

I cannot think of anyone else who has infiltrated the system and transformed it so radically from within. Navi Pillay is, after all, the six-year-old girl who stood in a court in Durban and gave evidence when her father was robbed by a colleague. When the robber was convicted but the court process failed to see the money returned, she was left asking, “Where is my father’s money? Is this justice?”

The difference is that now she is 85 years old, with a long and illustrious career behind her. Her question remains but now it has a global focus: “Where is justice for each and every one of us?”

Her life-long quest for justice has won her enemies too, those who would belittle her efforts or criticise her methods, although the ideals she adheres to may be harder to fault. But she appreciates that history unravels in surprising ways.

Who would have thought that Jan Smuts, a white supremacist, would leave the preamble to the UN charter as his lasting legacy to the world? Who would have believed in 1963 that Nelson Mandela would one day be president of South Africa? And who would have guessed that the six-year-old who questioned the meaning of justice in a Durban court would one day win the Nobel Peace Prize?

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Columbus’ Own Writings Reveal How Tightly Religion And Conquest Were Intertwined From The Start

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:09:01 -0700

A manuscript with the text of the letter Cristopher Columbus wrote in February 1493, giving his account of the first voyage to the Americas. Archivo General de Simancas/Spanish Ministry of Culture via Wikimedia Commons

BY PETER C. MANCALL

Few historic figures are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. For some, in both Spain and the United States, he remains a great hero, an explorer who found a “new world.” He is reviled by others who see him as an arrogant conqueror: the first European to enslave Indigenous Americans, and the man who launched ecological destruction in the Western Hemisphere.

As a historian who writes about early encounters between Europeans, Indigenous Americans and Africans in North America, I believe it is important to recapture this period as much as we can from existing documents – including Columbus’ own writings. Those texts reveal the enormous importance the push to spread Christianity played in Europeans’ colonial plans from the start.

In my 2026 book, “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680,” I describe how Europeans’ religious desires shaped the creation of American colonies that benefited conquerors, at a high cost to those they displaced or enslaved. In the Americas, the linkage of religious purpose and the eager pursuit of glory and wealth began in 1492.

Before Columbus

Long before Columbus set sail, Europeans were already eager to expand their faith – and territory. Centuries earlier, Crusaders had ridden into the Middle East to reclaim what they saw as their holy land from Muslims.

That contest took place in Spain as well. Muslim armies had invaded from North Africa in the 700s, and Muslim rulers eventually governed much of the peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese leaders waged the Reconquista, a centuries-long war that concluded with the 1492 expulsion of Jews and the defeat of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada.

By then, the Portuguese had laid claim to uninhabited mid-Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Madeira.

They also colonized the Canary Islands and forced local inhabitants into slavery on their plantations. In 1479, Portugal ceded control of the the Canary Islands to Spain in a treaty to end a war between the two nations. Spaniards expanded the importation of enslaved Africans to produce sugar.

First voyage

Columbus wanted to find the fastest way to get to the southwest Pacific to bring home exotic spices. He searched for sponsors to support his idea that Europeans could reach the the Spice Islands by sailing west across the Atlantic. Spain’s Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon provided funds to fit out three ships.

After his return, Columbus wrote a letter to his patrons, describing how, after 33 days at sea, he landed in the Bahamas. He labeled the people he met “Indios” because he thought he had reached Asia. The name stuck even though he was wrong about his point of arrival.

On his first voyage, Columbus claimed and renamed multiple islands, starting with San Salvador, or “Holy Savior.” “To the first of them I have given the name of our blessed Saviour, (with) whose aid I have reached this and all the rest,” he wrote. He named places after his patrons, too, along with other Christian names, such as Santa Maria de Concepion – Holy Mary of the Conception – and Navidad, Nativity.

He also laid claim to at least some Tainos. “I took by force some Indians from the first island,” he wrote, reporting that he wanted to teach them Spanish so they could “tell us what they knew” about environments new to him.

Soon after he returned to Spain, Columbus had the text printed. He wrote that “the whole of Christendom should rejoice” at discoveries he had made for his patrons “for all the glory they will receive when so many peoples turn to our Holy Faith.”

Within a few short years his words spread across Europe, translated from one language into another. Ferdinand and Isabella named him “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

Columbus returned to the islands on three subsequent journeys. On the second, he dispatched a friar named Ramón Pané to live among the people of Hispaniola, record their beliefs and find strategies for converting them to Christianity.

Conquest and Christianity

Word soon spread that Columbus had allowed forced labor of Indigenous peoples. In 1500, he returned to Spain in chains to face charges of incompetent administration of the colonies and enslaving subjects of the realm.

Eager to get back into his patrons’ good graces – especially Isabella’s, since she was the most alarmed at his actions – he became consumed by the history and theology of the church. He studied scripture as well as the writings of prominent theologians, including St. Augustine and the 15th-century French cardinal and astrologer Pierre d'Ailly.

Like a magpie on a spiritual quest, Columbus transcribed portions from the Bible and scholars into a kind of commonplace book – a journal where he recorded parts of scripture and other writings, including his own notes. He intended the book for his queen and king, though it is likely they never saw it.

Nonetheless, their condemnation softened and they gave him permission to return to the Indies. He probably took the book along on his fourth journey of 1504. His son Ferdinand, who promoted his father’s legacy, called it the “Book of Prophecies.”

Columbus told a powerful tale in its pages. He believed that God had endowed him with remarkable intelligence, despite enemies’ allegations that he was “an uneducated man, an uninformed sailor, an ordinary person.”

Columbus compared his struggles with those of biblical prophets, saying he was like Isaiah, who “was not just a prophet, but also an evangelist” who called “all people to our holy Catholic faith.” He wrote about the discovery of islands and converting “all peoples and nations.” He reported that the Roman historian Seneca had prophesied that “a large landmass” would appear during “the last years of the world,” adding that a “new sailor” would “discover a new world.”

In this book, which was not published in his lifetime, Columbus recast the renaming and charting of Caribbean islands as a religious pursuit. He used Scripture to try to understand its geography, specifically seeking the Mount Zion mentioned in the Bible. He believed he had uncovered the Caribbean’s secrets because he had divine support for his task. The explorer wanted his royal patrons to see his role in history as something foretold by the ancients.

A complicated legacy

Columbus’ reputation has suffered over the years, with greater focus on what followed his voyages, including the spread of enslavement and environmental destruction. As one scholar put it in 1992, amid commemorations of the 500th anniversary of his first journey, the explorer was “mugged on the way to his own party.”

In recent years, protesters have torn down his statues and splattered others with red paint. His defenders have dredged statues out of rivers and remounted them. Each side has focused on his actions and their impact rather than his writings.

In those texts, the conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere were inseparable from religious conversion. His actions echoed in subsequent generations, evident in other Europeans’ efforts to spread Christianity in the Americas. Catholic Iberians, English Anglicans and Puritans, and French Huguenots all latched onto that same idea: the hemisphere should become integrated into Christendom.

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Anne Carson’s Nobel‑Winning, Genre‑Defying Work Bridges The Gap Between Ancient Greek Literature And Modern Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 18:57:11 -0700

Canadian essayist, poet and translator Anne Carson in New York City at the 2024 National Book Awards. Jay Dixit/WikiPortraits via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

BY AMY CANNON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF WRITING,

USC DORSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS,

ARTS AND SCIENCES

The same year that Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has broken box office record after box office record, Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature at the age of 76.

Although Nolan and Carson differ in approach, medium and critical reception, both have sought to make works of ancient Greece new for a contemporary audience.

This creative accessibility is likely at least part of why the Nobel committee has seen fit to honor Carson’s “bold and inventive” body of work, which defies genre: Her poems, essays, translations, stage productions and collaborations often evoke another time and place but speak freshly and vividly to audiences today.

Translation made original

Take, for example, her 2019 staged performance, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy.” In it, Carson overlays Helen of Troy with Marilyn Monroe in order to explore the destructive power of beauty. By revisiting an ancient figure blamed for the Trojan war through the lens of a 20th-century sex symbol, Carson invites audiences to reflect on the ways both women have come to represent glamour and tragedy.

Her 2015 translation of the play “Antigone,” which toured internationally, hews closer to Sophocles’ original. Yet her lively version inflects this ancient tragedy with a contemporary voice. Creon’s lament over his dead wife, which Richard C. Jebb translates as “O miserable that I am, and steeped in miserable anguish!” is rendered in her translation “now I am perfectly blended with pain.” Jebb’s Antigone says “ah me unhappy! who have no home on the earth or in the shades” whereas Carson’s says “I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I” about her dilemma.

Other projects of hers veer into forms the ancient world would have had trouble recognizing. She collaborated with artist Rosanna Bruno on a 2021 graphic novel adaptation of Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women,” first performed in 415 B.C.E. In 2025, she even read her poems on an album for the indie rock band Rheostatics. Dave Bidini, one of the band’s founding members, described Carson as an artist who “hasn’t been afraid to experiment with language, to carve a place that’s her own with her work.”

Leaving space for imagination

The originality of her contribution can also arise from a refusal to do what many tend to expect from translations of ancient works in particular.

“If Not, Winter,” her 2002 translation of Sappho, drew attention to the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s surviving work.

Only one complete poem of Sappho’s entire corpus exists: her “Ode to Aphrodite.” Of the remaining fragments, some are lengthy, some only a word or two long, often quoted by other ancient authors. A number were found in shreds of papyri likely recycled to wrap mummies.

In her translation, where papyri were tattered or a word obscured, Carson indicates this by using brackets and white space. Rather than eliding them, Carson ends up bringing attention to these absences – an utterly distinctive choice.

Carson states in the introduction to the translation that the brackets “imply a free space of imaginal adventure,” an invitation to fill in the blank of language now lost to us. Additionally, as classicist and translator Emily Wilson notes, Carson “adds no possessive pronouns or definite articles” that are not present in the Greek, another way she lets contemporary readers meet Sappho’s fragments head on.

Where Carson lets an ancient voice speak without interposition, some have found “her particular kind of austerity” wanting. Wilson, for instance, is critical of Carson’s refusal to tilt her translation in a way that acknowledges the important role that Sappho’s gender and sexuality have played in her reception over time.

Wilson further critiques Carson’s “An Oresteia,” her 2010 translation and adaptation of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Wilson writes that Carson “is acutely conscious of the differences, in mood, worldview and style, among the three tragedians she translates. It is, then, a disappointment that she does not entirely succeed in making them sound properly distinct from one another.”

A running dialogue with literary greats

It may be that the most distinctive voice in Carson’s translations of ancient authors is her own. But even her original work owes an evident debt to the words of others. She writes with and through other literary voices throughout her work.

Her long poem “The Glass Essay” explores romantic heartbreak and familial sorrow in dialogue with the life and work of Emily Brontë.

“Nox,” an art book and work of poetry created after her brother’s passing, is also an exploration of the elegy that the Roman poet Catullus wrote to his own brother over 2,000 years before.

And this is what Carson so often does so well: She draws the past into the present and refreshes it for us with a poet’s capacity for language and a classicist’s awareness of the long legacy of literature.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Fighting Without Holding: Why Military Operations Fail To Produce Security In West Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 11:01:36 -0700

BY DR. ANOUAR BOUKHARS

PROFESSOR OF COUNTERTERRORISM, AFRICAN

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, NATIONAL

DEFENSE UNIVERSITY

States across West Africa have expanded military deployments, acquired new equipment, and deepened security partnerships to confront violent militant groups. Yet these efforts have often produced temporary disruption rather than durable security. This article explains why. It argues that the central problem is not simply weak capacity, but the failure to convert military pressure into lasting political and territorial effects. Security forces frequently struggle to move quickly, act on intelligence, reinforce exposed positions, protect civilians, and remain present after operations end. These operational weaknesses are compounded by fragmented authority, weak logistics, poor institutional learning, overreliance on military force, and insufficient civilian follow-on capacity. Meanwhile, groups such as JNIM and IS-Sahel exploit mobility, local embedding, coercive governance, and cross-border networks to survive pressure and reenter contested areas. Drawing on interviews and practitioner workshops across West Africa, the article argues that lasting progress requires converting presence into persistence, information into action, force into legitimacy, and national effort into regional effect.

For more than a decade, states across West Africa,1 supported by regional organizations and international partners, have invested heavily in confronting violent militant groups.2 These states have increased resources, expanded military deployments, and developed new partnerships. Yet, with few exceptions, their efforts have not produced lasting gains on the ground. Armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State have continued to spread, adapt, and embed themselves across large parts of the region. Extensive military activity has produced effects that are often limited and short-lived.

The limited effectiveness of counter-militancy operations is not the result of an absence of effort, but of the difficulty of converting military pressure into durable security: the ability to deny militant freedom of movement, protect civilians, keep key routes open, prevent reentry into cleared areas, and restore credible state presence after operations end. Across West Africa, forces often struggle to move quickly, maintain surveillance, reinforce exposed positions, and remain present after operations. Intelligence is collected but not consistently translated into timely action, while fixed deployments are bypassed, isolated, or attacked before support arrives. As a result, military operations frequently disrupt militant activity without preventing its return once pressure recedes.

These constraints are not merely technical. They reflect deeper weaknesses in how forces are organized, trained, led, sustained, and employed. Many militaries remain oriented toward static defense and reactive operations, while violent militant groups exploit mobility, local knowledge, cross-border networks, and tactical adaptation. The result is a persistent gap between activity and outcome: Forces deploy and respond, but often fail to deny movement, prevent reentry into cleared areas, or sustain authority over time. Closing this gap requires more than additional matériel; it requires changes in doctrine, training systems, leadership practices, force design, and the assumptions guiding the use of force.

Operational limitations are reinforced by strategic misalignment and insufficient local capacity for effective civilian security provision once military operations conclude. State and international responses have relied heavily on reactive coercion without sufficiently linking military operations to the broader security environment. Security operations may create temporary disruption, but they rarely produce lasting security unless followed by effective civilian security capacity: sustained presence, protection of civilians, dispute resolution, service delivery, and credible administration. Where populations perceive security forces as weak, distant, or unreliable, militant groups are better able to exploit fear, grievance, and abandonment. Where security forces are seen as capable, protective, and predictable, cooperation improves and militant groups face greater constraints.

These dynamics affect outcomes beyond the region itself. Consolidation of violent militant groups in West Africa threatens commercial routes linking landlocked states to Atlantic ports, disrupts access to strategic commodities, accelerates displacement toward North Africa and Europe, and expands permissive environments for transnational criminal and armed networks. This, in turn, draws in external actors who make the security landscape more crowded and complex: Russia has emerged as a prominent security partner in the central Sahel, while China, Türkiye, and Gulf states have expanded their roles through arms transfers, training, surveillance and intelligence support, investment, and political backing. This diversification has not produced more effective outcomes. Instead, it has often fragmented security cooperation, reinforced short-term coercive responses, and weakened incentives for institutional reform—widening the gap between expanding inputs and limited results on the ground.

More than a decade of counter-militancy efforts have therefore failed to deliver lasting security in West Africa. How has this gap emerged and persisted? Below, I clarify how operational and institutional constraints shape outcomes on the ground, and what changes might be required to convert military capacity into durable security effects. I draw on interviews with commanders, intelligence officials, border-security practitioners, and other security experts across the region,3 including Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria, as well as Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Mauritania, and the central Sahel.

Converting initial military success into sustained security involves four interdependent tasks: transforming presence into persistence, information into action, force into legitimacy, and national effort into regional effect. Together, these mechanisms reduce militant freedom of movement, strengthen the confidence of local populations, and improve the government’s leverage in any future negotiations, reintegration efforts, or local political settlements. Civilian protection therefore emerges as a central mechanism linking operational effectiveness to political authority across all four tasks. For external partners, the implication is clear: Assistance that prioritizes equipment, episodic training, or short-term outputs without strengthening underlying security governance reinforces the very gaps that assistance tries to address.

What Went Wrong

Despite international assistance, militant attacks have intensified and armed groups have expanded their reach across parts of West Africa. Figure 1 illustrates the geographic spread of Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State in the Sahel (IS-Sahel) activity across the central Sahel—the landlocked subregion of West Africa—in 2025. The map shows how militant violence now extends across border zones, transport corridors, and areas where state presence remains uneven.

Three interacting dynamics help explain the intensification of militant violence in West Africa. The first is structural: Weak state capacity, fragmented authority, and unresolved local grievances create permissive environments for militant expansion. The second is operational: Security forces often struggle to combine mobility, intelligence, logistics, and coordination in ways that deny militant freedom of movement and protect civilians. The third is strategic: State and international responses have relied heavily on military force without sufficiently linking operations to civilian protection, effective administration, dispute resolution, and the management of local conflicts over land, grazing, trade, and political authority.

Structural Deficits

Militant expansion across the Sahel and West Africa is rooted in uneven state presence, contested local authority, and unresolved disputes over protection, livelihoods, and political inclusion.4 Limited administrative reach, uneven security provision, and scarce public services create openings for armed groups to recruit, intimidate local authorities, tax movement and commerce, arbitrate disputes, and present themselves as alternative providers of order, particularly in rural and border areas. Where these openings intersect with cross-border mobility and competing centers of influence, they create permissive conditions for militant penetration and entrenchment.5

These openings are reinforced by a political economy in which insecurity can serve the interests of some local power-holders. In affected areas, state officials, local authorities, business elites, armed intermediaries, and community leaders compete over access to livestock markets, artisanal mining sites, transport routes, customs posts, land, and protection arrangements. In such settings, instability is not only a symptom of state weakness—it also becomes a means of extraction, influence, and control. Public resources are diverted, accountability weakens, and institutions responsible for protection and service delivery lose credibility. Armed groups exploit this erosion by inserting themselves into disputes over security, justice, access, and livelihoods.6

These political economy dynamics also shape the security sector. Armed forces and police institutions operate within the same systems of patronage, bargaining, and weak oversight that affect civilian administration. Nigeria illustrates the institutional version of this problem. Formal civilian control has coexisted with politicized personnel decisions, fragmented authority, and heavy reliance on the military for domestic security missions. Appointment practices have reflected political bargaining as well as professional criteria, thus weakening professional incentives, reducing accountability, and blurring the line between civilian oversight and personalized political control in the campaign against Boko Haram.7

The operational consequence is direct. When appointments, command assignments, and resources are shaped by political loyalty, factional management, or regime-security concerns, armed forces can remain active without producing durable security.8 Commanders are not always rewarded for battlefield performance; capable officers can be sidelined; units can be deployed according to political priorities rather than operational need; and poor performance becomes harder to sanction. The result is a force that deploys, patrols, and responds to attacks, but struggles to sustain pressure on mobile armed groups, protect civilians after operations, keep routes open, and restore credible state presence in contested areas.

Militant groups have taken root within this environment by embedding themselves in local conflicts and social dynamics.9 Many of these armed groups, now associated with JNIM, Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), and IS-Sahel, did not emerge as fully formed transnational organizations, but evolved along distinct pathways—rooted in social and political grievances,10 livelihood insecurity,11 and secessionist conflict12—before later connecting to broader transnational militant networks. Over time, these trajectories converged as militant actors tied deeply localized conflicts over protection, authority, justice, land, and livelihoods to the transnational ideological projects of al-Qaeda central and Islamic State central.

Geography amplifies the risks that weak governance and local grievances generate. Long distances, porous borders, and difficult terrain limit state oversight. Violent militant groups exploit these conditions by moving between areas of weak control, circulating resources, and applying pressure without needing to hold territory permanently. Their advantage lies less in fixed control than in mobility and the ability to exploit gaps in state presence.13

These conditions also shape how local populations interact with militant groups.14 Cooperation is often driven less by ideology15 than by practical concerns like security, access to resources, and economic survival.16 Herders, traders, miners, and transporters may engage with armed groups to maintain livelihoods in uncertain environments,17 thereby allowing militant groups to insert themselves into everyday economic and social relations.

Taken together, these structural deficits lower barriers to militant entry, facilitate local entrenchment, and make it harder for the state to reassert authority once armed groups have embedded themselves in local systems of protection, coercion, and exchange.

Operational Gaps

If structural deficits explain the environment in which militant groups become embedded, operational gaps explain why security forces struggle to convert deployments into consistent territorial control. Across the region, the central challenge is the integration of mobility, intelligence, coordination, logistics, and command. Forces that arrive late, move predictably, reinforce slowly, or leave after short operations give mobile adversaries room to withdraw, regroup, and return.18

“Militant mobility and operational endurance pose significant challenges.”

Militant mobility and operational endurance pose significant challenges. Rapid-deployment units remain too limited to cover the region’s vast distances, leaving large rural and border areas unevenly secured. In Mali, militants have been able to pressure major transport corridors and supply routes, stretching the army across central, northern, western, and southern axes and limiting its ability to concentrate forces where territorial control is most consequential: the routes linking Bamako to Senegal through Kayes, to Côte d’Ivoire through Sikasso, and to Guinea through Koulikoro, as well as the central Mali corridors around Ségou, San, Mopti, and the Niger River. The broader operational problem is not simply distance, but dispersion. Militant pressure forces governments to defend many exposed points at once, while mobile fighters retain the initiative between them.

Limited or uneven infrastructure development exacerbates the challenge of distance. Government forces are often confined to a limited road network and move at a relatively slow and predictable pace, while militants maneuver more fluidly through secondary tracks, scrubland, wooded areas, and seasonal riverbeds.19 Weak infrastructure and difficult terrain constrain military vehicles, whereas fighters on motorbikes20 can bypass fixed positions, avoid chokepoints, and exploit gaps in state coverage. Under these conditions, even substantial deployments may struggle to reopen corridors or push militants back in lasting ways.21

Benin and Côte d’Ivoire show how mobility constraints translate into discontinuous territorial presence. In Benin, one military expert described the core weakness as the intervals between state positions: Security forces hold specific points, while armed groups move through the spaces between them to observe, strike, and withdraw.22 An Ivorian military commander made a related observation, noting that even their denser defensive posture remains constrained by poor roads, difficult tracks, and the challenge of sustaining patrols near the border.23 Across these contexts, the central issue is not the size of deployments, but whether forces can reposition, reinforce, and sustain presence quickly enough to deny militants freedom of movement.

Limitations in mobility are compounded by weaknesses in surveillance and response systems. Drones and light aircraft can improve visibility, but their value depends on whether they are embedded in a wider chain linking detection, analysis, decision, and intervention. A Beninese official emphasized that surveillance platforms without a functioning exploitation chain risk becoming little more than cameras, particularly when armed groups adapt faster than states can develop detection and response capacity.24 An Ivorian officer made a parallel point, stressing that even improved surveillance remains limited if operator training, force integration, and ground mobility do not allow information to be converted into timely action.25 These deficiencies have been especially consequential in Mali, where long distances, exposed borders, and shifting lines of pressure make persistent surveillance and rapid support particularly valuable.26 Across the region, the challenge is therefore not simply acquiring more platforms, but ensuring that surveillance, mobility, logistics, and command systems operate as a coherent whole. Where that integration is weak, state responses remain more reactive than anticipatory.27

These operational gaps are exacerbated by force-posture choices. As states concentrate troops and matériel in more defensible positions, they reduce vulnerability at fixed sites, but lose influence over the terrain between them. Tactical survivability does not produce territorial control; a posture centered on holding strongpoints may amount to strategic contraction if it grants militants freedom of movement. This dilemma is visible across the region, from Benin’s exposed northern border to Mali’s difficulty securing roads and supply routes through which violent militant groups isolate communities and apply pressure without seizing major urban centers outright.

The Nigerian case, in the Lake Chad basin, illustrates this problem. Difficult terrain, insecure routes, island and marshland sanctuaries, and limited riverine and amphibious capability leave remote positions exposed and hard to reinforce.28 This vulnerability was evident on January 24, 2025, when ISWAP fighters attacked the Nigerian army position at Malam Fatori associated with the 149th Battalion, killing at least twenty soldiers, including the commander, after hours of fighting. The episode underscored a broader doctrinal problem: Frontline positions are often expected to absorb attacks until reinforcements arrive, yet chronic shortages of mobility, air support, and operational flexibility mean that assistance frequently comes too late.29 Each lost outpost transfers weapons, momentum, and psychological advantage to militants, while eroding troop morale and public confidence. Static defense without rapid reinforcement capacity can thus turn tactical positions into strategic liabilities.

Mobility gaps are compounded by intelligence gaps. The problem is not only information scarcity, but conversion failure: Relevant fragments often exist across police, military intelligence, customs, immigration, financial intelligence units, local communities, and regional partners, but remain institutionally disconnected. The weakest point is often the middle of the intelligence cycle—processing, validation, triage, interpretation, prioritization, and dissemination—where raw reporting either becomes usable intelligence or remains inert.30 In rural and border areas, weak community trust, language gaps, and poor protection for informants reduce early warning. Inside government, mandate protection, overclassification, unclear sharing rules, and institutional mistrust slow the movement of information to those positioned to act.31

Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin illustrate different parts of this conversion problem. A senior official at Ghana’s National Counter Terrorism Fusion Center noted that coordination often breaks down as agencies protect mandates, compete for credit, and resist sharing information.32 Côte d’Ivoire faced a similar problem before the creation of its counterterrorism fusion structure in August 2021, when bureaucracy and institutional rivalry slowed the movement of information into operational channels. In Benin, two intelligence officials described the tactical version of the same gap: Surveillance platforms and local reporting identify movement or risk, but without an integrated chain linking analysis, authorization, mobility, and follow-on presence, information does not translate into timely interdiction or sustained state presence.33

Other human and institutional factors widen these gaps. Rapid recruitment into counter-militant forces has often outpaced training and professionalization, leaving many soldiers without the discipline or technical competence to use modern equipment effectively.34 Interviews with officers in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria suggest major challenges in terms of skill retention and institutionalization across rotations and changing operational environments.35 Without that, specialized assets are frequently underused, mismanaged, or captured by militants.36 Weak maintenance systems, poor troop welfare, insufficient rotation, and uneven combat exposure reduce effectiveness over time. Force expansion and matériel acquisition do not translate into operational effectiveness when training, sustainment, and organizational adaptation lag behind.

Recurring misallocation of military force also contributes to the challenges of territorial control. Because police and civilian security institutions often lack the reach, equipment, and personnel to manage routine protection, armed forces are pulled into substitute-policing roles, limiting their ability to focus on missions that require military capabilities. Nigeria illustrates the cost: Soldiers routinely perform roadblock, installation-protection, convoy-escort, and internal-security duties that consume the personnel, vehicles, fuel, and command attention needed for mobile patrols, pursuit operations, rapid reinforcement, intelligence-led raids, and disruption of militant logistics.37 The result is an overstretched force that remains visibly active but less able to deny militant freedom of movement, dismantle networks, or consolidate gains after operations. Areas cleared by soldiers remain vulnerable when police, gendarmerie, intelligence services, and local administration are not able to provide follow-on security, monitoring, and public authority.

Logistics and coordination underlie almost all of these operational constraints. Fuel, maintenance, resupply, communications, and medical support are often treated as secondary functions, but shape operational choices throughout. Ivorian units that cannot rely on secure resupply or functioning equipment become more cautious in their movements and less willing to remain in exposed positions.38 A Beninese expert on border security made a similar point, emphasizing that a border is lost when state presence becomes discontinuous; gaps in logistics, coordination, and trust are precisely the spaces in that armed groups settle.39 Mali’s armed forces underscore the same lesson: Acquisition of additional equipment, including air assets, has not translated into decisive advantage.40

Finally, problems of cross-border coordination reduce West African forces’ ability to exercise territorial control as well.41 Benin illustrates the problem along its northern border with Burkina Faso and Niger, particularly around the W-Arly-Pendjari complex. Beninese forces face JNIM-linked networks that use parklands, forested corridors, and border communities to move, recruit, and resupply beyond Benin’s reach. Cooperation has become more difficult since the coup-led governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), weakening regional channels for intelligence exchange, cross-border pursuit, and joint planning. Without reliable counterpart arrangements across the border, Benin can patrol, reinforce, and hold positions inside its own territory, but it cannot deny militants sanctuary, logistics, and retreat routes outside its jurisdiction.42 The result is strategic depth for JNIM-linked networks and episodic pressure rather than sustained disruption.

Strategic Misalignment in Countering Violent Militant Groups

Structural deficits and operational weaknesses are compounded by strategic misalignment among both state and international actors. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria, government responses to militant groups have repeatedly prioritized raids, strikes, emergency rule, auxiliary forces, and movement restrictions over sustained civilian protection,43 dispute resolution, and the restoration of public authority. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have relied heavily on emergency measures, auxiliary forces, and restrictions on movement of people in response to rural insecurity. In northeastern Nigeria, repeated military deployments, checkpoints, convoy escorts, and cordon-and-search practices have often been substituted for durable policing, justice, and local administration.

This imbalance also appears in restrictions imposed on local economies, including curfews, market closures, limits on herder movement, and bans on local trade. Such measures are intended to disrupt militant logistics, but they often function as broad punitive tools that damage livelihoods,44 intensify resentment, and push some communities toward accommodation with armed groups perceived as more predictable or responsive to local needs.45

External partners have deepened this imbalance by approaching the problem primarily as a fight against violent militant networks rather than as a broader breakdown of local security and political authority. France’s Operation Barkhane, launched in Mali in 2014 and wound down in 2022 as relations with Malian military authorities deteriorated, reflected this limitation.46 The operation generated pressure on al-Qaeda– and Islamic State–linked groups, and helped remove senior militant figures, but it was focused on a narrow counter-militancy model: locating, pursuing, and striking designated targets.47

That model became increasingly mismatched to the conflict that was taking shape on the ground.48 Militant violence had become intertwined with communal retaliation, land and resource disputes, banditry, predatory local militias, and abuses by state-aligned forces—dynamics that targeted strikes were not designed to resolve. As insecurity spread from northern Mali into central Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, civilians faced threats not only from militant groups but also from criminal actors, armed community factions, and state-aligned forces. Communities saw national and foreign forces confront some militant actors while leaving other sources of violence largely unaddressed. By prioritizing the elimination of militant leaders over civilian protection, local dispute management, restraint of abusive auxiliaries, and restoration of credible administration, Barkhane produced tactical disruption without reversing the wider erosion of security and authority.49

Barkhane’s limitation was not simply that it relied too heavily on force; it was that the mission’s employment of force was designed for a different conflict than the one actually unfolding.50 Tactical gains did not produce durable stability because fear, grievance, impunity, communal insecurity, and weak governance continued to feed instability.

Military and political objectives were also poorly aligned. State and international actors consistently invoked legitimacy, service delivery, and the restoration of public authority, yet rarely integrated these objectives into operational strategy. While security frameworks formally linked military action to development and governance, civilian components remained too weakly institutionalized, unevenly financed, and politically subordinate to military operations to be able to take over effectively where needed. In practice, force remained the organizing principle, with governance as a long-term aspiration rather than an immediate strategic requirement.51

Such governance issues spanned both the security sector and the region’s political economy. Efforts to extend administration, deliver services, or rebuild trust have been frequently undermined by elite predation, corruption, and weak oversight, including within the security sector itself.52 At the same time, geopolitical competition expanded the range of external partners available to Sahelian governments without improving strategic coherence. Since the coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, military-led governments have downgraded or expelled several Western and multilateral security partners while seeking alternative sources of military support, diplomatic backing, and regime protection.

Russia has been the most active external player, combining military assistance, information campaigns, and anti-colonial messaging with a willingness to engage on the terms desired by West African regimes and leaders.53 China plays a less direct but increasingly important role in this realignment.54 Its engagement combines affordable military equipment, training and maintenance support, police cooperation, surveillance technology, and broader economic and diplomatic ties. Chinese defense firms have become regular suppliers of armored vehicles and related systems in West Africa,55 while public-security cooperation has expanded through police partnerships, law-enforcement training, equipment transfers, and surveillance tools.56 Türkiye has engaged mainly through defense exports, especially drones and related training, while Gulf states have increased influence through finance, infrastructure, mediation, religious outreach, and selective security engagement.57

This broader menu of partnerships has given West African governments greater flexibility, but has not produced more effective counter-militancy capabilities.58 More often, it has weakened incentives for accountability and reform, and further fragmented the security landscape. The result is a persistent gap between diagnosis and execution: Even where actors recognize that military force alone will not produce durable stability, they have failed to implement the institutional reforms, accountability measures, and sustained civilian investment required to make alternative strategies credible.

When force is not paired with consistent civilian protection, accountable administration, and visible improvements in governance, communities increasingly perceive the state and its partners as distant, coercive, and unreliable. Violent militant groups exploit these perceptions by presenting themselves as more dependable providers of order, arbitration, or protection in areas where official authority is weak or absent. Strategic misalignment therefore does not simply fail to halt militant expansion—it also widens the social and political space in which such groups consolidate.

West African governments, external partners, and practitioners have long recognized that battlefield pressure alone cannot secure lasting stability, but incentives and institutional habits continue to shape their strategic choices.59 Military action produces visible outputs, is easier to justify politically, and aligns with institutions oriented toward hierarchy, force protection, and short-term crisis management. Measures such as civilian protection, accountable governance, and local political engagement are harder to organize, slower to show results, and less immediately legible as success. The cumulative effect is one of diminishing returns: Coercion continues, legitimacy declines, and the erosion of trust creates the very conditions in which violent militant groups expand and build competing systems of authority.60

The Structural Foundations of Militant Resilience

In West Africa, JNIM—the region’s most adaptive transnational militant actor— and the comparatively less expansive but increasingly entrenched IS-Sahel have consolidated themselves where governance is weakest, security is fragmented, and state authority is contested. Within these vacuums, militant endurance rests on four mutually reinforcing pillars: revolutionary belief, revolutionary warfare, organizational structure, and transnational reach. Together, these pillars help explain not only how militant groups persist under pressure, but also why state efforts often struggle to translate military activity into sustained authority.

Revolutionary Belief

Revolutionary belief forms one foundation of militant resilience, shaping motivation, discipline, and the justification of violence.61 In West Africa, JNIM and its constituent factions, and IS-Sahel in a different register, frame their struggle as an effort to replace corrupt, abusive, or illegitimate state authority with a religiously based order that promises protection, justice, and moral discipline.62 This ideological claim gains force when it attaches to local grievances over state abuse, elite predation, land access, pastoralist marginalization, and exclusion from local authority.

Katiba Macina, a central Mali constituent of JNIM, illustrates the point. Under Amadou Kouffa, the group linked religious claims about justice and Islamic order to Fulani pastoralist grievances, disputes over land and status, and resentment toward state officials, local elites, and armed self-defense groups. Belief therefore becomes operational—it helps define enemies, justify attacks on state representatives and local authority figures, discipline supporters, and present militant coercion as a form of justice rather than simply violence. In fragmented sociopolitical environments, such claims allow militant groups to project influence beyond their material capabilities by making violence appear purposeful, morally authorized, and connected to a broader political-religious project.

Revolutionary Warfare

Revolutionary warfare provides the strategic logic guiding the militant campaigns of political subversion, violence, and territorial influence.63 Like other insurgent models,64 revolutionary warfare blends irregular attacks with ideological and administrative action to build authority from below, gradually shifting governance away from the state. In peripheral areas, militant groups displace state presence and establish parallel systems that tax, adjudicate disputes, regulate markets, and enforce order. This governance is sustained through a calibrated mix of coercion, protection, and limited service provision. As their influence expands, militant groups shift from hit-and-run attacks to more coordinated assaults on towns65 and security installations, financing operations through resource extraction from populations under their control. Their success depends less on battlefield dominance than on the ability to regulate violence—deciding when to escalate, when to restrain, and how to direct force toward political ends.66

JNIM’s use of localized blockades illustrates this approach. Rather than occupying territory outright, the group uses a classic guerrilla technique: isolating communities by restricting access routes, disrupting movement, and applying targeted force to induce shortages and pressure populations.67 As conditions deteriorate and state protection remains absent or unpredictable, communities begin to accept negotiated arrangements under JNIM’s terms in exchange for relief.68 Farabougou, in the Niono Cercle in Mali’s Ségou region, offers a clear example. After months under blockade beginning in October 2020, local representatives accepted a temporary ceasefire in March 2021 that reopened access routes, allowed displaced residents to return, and permitted militant preachers to enter surrounding villages.69 Similar local arrangements have often been negotiated under pressure and have included commitments such as the payment of an Islamic alms tax (zakat), dress restrictions, and acceptance of militant movement or preaching. This strategy allows JNIM to exert control without permanent occupation or overextension; relief becomes conditional on compliance, enabling militants to maintain pressure while conserving resources.

IS-Sahel has pursued a comparable approach, though with more limited success. Internal fragmentation, sustained military pressure, and competition with JNIM have constrained its ability to consolidate control beyond core areas.70

Organizational Structure

Translating ideology and strategy into sustained control depends on organization and leadership. In irregular warfare, effectiveness is shaped less by material superiority than by the ability to operate adaptively at the local level. Militant groups gain advantage by developing leadership within small units capable of coordinating action, maintaining discipline, and adapting to changing conditions.71 In West Africa, JNIM combines centralized strategic direction with delegated authority to regional commanders and local battalions (katiba).72 This structure allows for coherence at the strategic level while preserving flexibility across diverse environments.73 It has enabled JNIM to absorb setbacks, avoid fragmentation, and sustain pressure across zones.74

Equally important, JNIM’s structure supports the gradual assumption of governance functions. In areas where state authority is weak, governance is negotiated among local actors. JNIM inserts itself by co-opting some of these actors, intimidating or eliminating others, and reshaping local authority structures to its advantage. It assumes quasi-state roles—resolving disputes, collecting taxes, and organizing security—within a system grounded in coercion, protection, and compliance.75

JNIM’s authority does not rest only on the charisma of individual commanders such as Iyad ag Ghali or Amadou Kouffa. It is also reproduced through more durable organizational practices: delegated authority to local katiba, enforcement of internal discipline, religious adjudication, taxation, punishment of collaborators, and messaging that links local grievances to al-Qaeda’s broader political project.76 That project rejects existing secular states and foreign-backed political orders and seeks to replace them with a militant political order grounded in the movement’s own interpretation of religious authority and armed governance. These practices give JNIM a degree of continuity across different local environments even when commanders are killed, displaced, or forced to operate under pressure. As a result, JNIM operates as a hybrid armed actor seeking not only to regulate violence, but also to shape economic life, and embed itself into political life.77

IS-Sahel has adopted elements of a similar model but with more uneven outcomes. Following leadership changes in 2021, it reorganized along zone-based lines and sought to reflect local ethnic dynamics. It has also attempted to impose governance structures, including religious regulation and market control, enforced through a combination of coercion and messaging. IS-Sahel’s resilience draws on diversified funding sources—kidnapping, extortion, cattle theft, mining, and smuggling—alongside continued links to transnational Islamic State networks.78 However, internal rivalries and sustained military pressure have limited IS-Sahel’s ability to embed militant governance beyond core strongholds.79

Transnational Reach

Transnational reach provides militant networks with strategic depth, enabling them to move fighters, resources, and ideas across porous borders when doing so confers an advantage.80 Weakly regulated borders between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—and increasingly coastal West African states—serve as corridors for arms, fuel, gold, and other illicit commodities. These flows are reinforced by long-standing smuggling networks and kinship-based mobility. Under pressure, militant units can disperse across borders and reconstitute, limiting the effectiveness of state responses that remain confined within national boundaries. Connections to broader al-Qaeda and Islamic State networks further enhance these units’ capacity by providing ideological framing, organizational branding, tactical learning, propaganda channels, and access to wider militant narratives. These links help local militant actors present local disputes as part of a wider political-religious struggle, signal prestige within militant circles, circulate tactics and justifications across theaters, and sustain a sense of movement continuity even when individual units come under pressure.

Together, these four pillars enable militant groups to absorb setbacks and transform localized grievances into durable, cross-border insurgencies. These pillars generate the self-reinforcing logic of expansion shown in figure 3: weaken state presence → regulate civilian life → extract resources → finance operations → extend pressure outward.

This process, however, is neither linear nor uniform. Where the state cannot be fully displaced, militant groups may accommodate selected officials, tolerate limited service provision, or otherwise adapt governance strategies to local conditions. At the core of this model, however, lies the fusion of violence with civilian control. Violence offers militant groups entry points into governance, and governance sustains further expansion of these groups through resource extraction, recruitment, and renewed operations. Over time, force and administration merge into a system of parallel authority sustained not by decisive victory but by the gradual normalization of militant rule.
The Operational Playbook of Militant Expansion

The four pillars of militant resilience explain how transnational militant movements endure. Once embedded in areas of weak governance, groups such as JNIM and IS-Sahel convert resilience into control through a phased and adaptive cycle—infiltration, contestation, consolidation, and projection—that is shaped by ideology, organizational design, and cross-border mobility. This sequence is not rigid, nor does it produce uniform territorial control. Rather, it captures a recurring pattern through which militants expand their presence, weaken state authority, and build varying degrees of coercive and political influence across West Africa.

Phase 1—Infiltration and Embedding

Militant entry rarely begins with open confrontation. It usually starts with quiet, probing: movement through border zones, forests, markets, grazing routes, and transport corridors; identification of local intermediaries; and the creation of small logistical networks. At this stage, militants are testing the terrain rather than openly contesting it. They map supply chains, assess state response times, identify vulnerable communities, and determine which actors can be recruited, paid, intimidated, or used for concealment.81

This pattern appears across several border zones. In northern Côte d’Ivoire, armed men were reported in forests, border villages, and areas around Comoé National Park before attacks became more visible in 2020–21.82 In Benin, militants similarly used preaching, trade, and movement through border communities to establish contacts and logistics before escalating violence.83 In western Mali, JNIM followed a comparable approach, probing routes and cultivating facilitators before applying more direct pressure on communities and security forces.84 By the time attacks became visible in these areas, militants had often already identified intermediaries, mapped supply chains, and inserted themselves into local economic and social systems. This early embedding made later recruitment, taxation, and territorial entrenchment easier.

Phase 2—Contestation and Coercion

After militants have tested routes, built contacts, and established small logistical footholds, they begin to contest state authority more openly. Violence in this phase is selective and calibrated. Militants strike security posts, patrols, convoys, and border personnel; introduce improvised explosive devices (IEDs); and pressure local figures suspected of cooperating with the state. The purpose is to make state protection appear uncertain, raise the cost of collaboration, and show communities that militants can punish opposition even without holding territory.85

Côte d’Ivoire shows this shift clearly. After earlier signs of militant movement in northern forests and border areas, the June 2020 attack at Kafolo marked a more visible turn toward confrontation. In 2020 and 2021, violence spread across parts of Bounkani and Tchologo, targeting security-force positions, customs and military posts, and convoys.86 Militants also moved through border villages and areas around Comoé National Park, where contact with civilians included religious messaging, intimidation, threats, and occasional abductions. Their presence remained uneven rather than permanent, but it was sufficient to unsettle local authority and force communities to reassess the risks of cooperating with the state.

Benin followed a similar trajectory along its northern frontier. After militants had used cross-border movement, preaching, trade, and local contacts to gain familiarity with the terrain, attacks increased around the W-Arly-Pendjari complex and nearby border zones. Security forces, park personnel, and state-linked actors became targets, while the use of mines and IEDs made movement more dangerous and reduced the state’s ability to reassure isolated communities.

In western Mali, JNIM’s low-profile penetration of transport corridors and local economies was followed by more direct pressure on communities, roads, and security positions. Threats, intimidation, and attacks made state association more costly, while militant enforcement became more predictable in areas where state presence was intermittent.

This phase does not yet amount to consolidated rule. It is a coercive transition. Militants use violence to weaken public confidence in state authority, isolate local opponents, and prepare the conditions for later recruitment, taxation, dispute resolution, and more durable forms of control.87

Phase 3—Consolidation and Rule

Consolidation begins when militant presence becomes routine enough to shape local behavior. At this stage, armed groups are no longer only passing through an area, building contacts, or attacking state targets. They begin influencing who moves, who trades, who pays, who cooperates with local authorities, and who faces punishment.88

The depth of this control varies sharply. Côte d’Ivoire shows an interrupted trajectory. After armed groups probed northern forests and border villages and escalated attacks in 2020–21, the Ivorian state pushed them back before they established durable systems of local rule. Militant activity remained closer to movement, refuge, and logistical support than to open administration.

Benin shows a more partial and contested pattern. In northern border areas, militant-linked actors inserted themselves into local economies around Kourou-Koualou and nearby border zones.89 Fuel traffickers paid for protection. Hunters supplied food and other goods in exchange for permission to operate. Other intermediaries used contested spaces for movement and profit. These arrangements did not create a full militant administration, but they gave armed actors influence over who could move, trade, hunt, and operate in insecure border spaces.

Mali shows the deeper version of this phase. Where JNIM has sustained pressure over time, civilians encounter militant authority through taxation,90 movement controls, religious adjudication, warnings to local leaders, and market regulation. Livestock owners, traders, transporters, farmers, and village authorities face demands for payment or compliance. Teachers, preachers, chiefs, and customary authorities operate under scrutiny, threat, or replacement. Disputes that once moved through state courts or customary systems are redirected toward militant-linked adjudication.

This authority becomes consequential through routine enforcement: Taxes are collected, movement is regulated, disputes are settled, and punishment becomes predictable. Over time, militant presence becomes less episodic and begins to function as an alternative form of local authority.

Phase 4—Projection and Expansion

Once militants consolidate influence in peripheral areas, they project force toward strategic corridors, supply routes, and population centers. The objective is not always to hold these spaces. It is often to stretch state forces, disrupt logistics, damage public confidence, and show that the political center is vulnerable.

Mali illustrates this phase most clearly. JNIM’s July 2022 attack on the Kati military base, near Bamako, signaled that the group could strike sites close to the state’s military core. The September 2024 attacks on Bamako’s gendarmerie training center and Modibo Keita International Airport reinforced the same message: Even heavily secured spaces could be penetrated.91 The April 2026 offensive marked an even sharper escalation. JNIM and the Front de libération de l’Azawad (FLA)92 launched coordinated attacks across widely separated locations, including Bamako, Kati, Gao, Kidal, Mopti, and Sévaré.93 The killing of Defense Minister Sadio Camara and the recapture of Kidal, the northern regional capital near the Algerian border, showed that the offensive was not merely tactical. It challenged the junta’s claim to have restored sovereignty and territorial control.

This phase shows JNIM’s ability to concentrate effects rather than forces. By striking several distant locations in a compressed period, militants stretched Malian and Russian-backed responses, disrupted defensive coordination, and exposed gaps in intelligence, mobility, and command. Cooperation with the FLA also revealed the movement’s pragmatism. JNIM did not need ideological convergence with Tuareg separatists to benefit from their territorial familiarity, northern networks, and political positioning. The result was a temporary but powerful alignment between actors with different end goals and a shared interest in weakening Bamako.94

“Militant networks often adapt faster than the states confronting them.”

Phase 4 therefore marks a shift from local pressure to national disruption. JNIM does not need to hold Bamako, Kati, airports, or major garrison towns to gain strategic effect. By striking them, it exposes intelligence gaps, stretches security responses, challenges official claims of control, and signals that insecurity has moved from the periphery into the state’s core.

Learning and Adaptation

Militant groups display a recognizable playbook: Embed within local systems, weaken state presence, establish limited governance, and project power outward through disruption and targeted attacks. This model evolves through experimentation and adaptation.

Militant networks often adapt faster than the states confronting them. They refine tactics, diversify funding, and integrate low-cost technologies to enhance coordination and effectiveness. Once reliant primarily on small arms and guerrilla tactics, these groups now incorporate commercial drones, encrypted communications, and digital propaganda into their operations.

Drone use illustrates this adaptation.95 Commercial drones that initially served reconnaissance and propaganda functions have increasingly been adapted for offensive operations.96 In May 2025, IS-Sahel carried out drone strikes in Eknewan, Niger, killing forty-one soldiers,97 followed by a JNIM attack on Boulikessi in Mali a week later that reportedly left over a hundred troops dead.98

The technological evolution of militant warfare is matched by the increasingly sophisticated use of digital media. In Mali, JNIM uses online communication to frame battlefield events before the state can fully control the narrative. After major engagements, the group releases claims, edited visuals, and images of weapons, vehicles, and positions captured or destroyed during fighting. These materials circulate through encrypted channels and social-media platforms, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and X, and are sometimes tailored linguistically for local audiences.99 The effect is to extend the life of an attack beyond the moment of combat. A raid becomes a demonstration of reach; seized matériel becomes evidence of state vulnerability; and battlefield imagery becomes a means of intimidation, recruitment, and psychological pressure. The Malian army has responded with its own official statements, casualty figures, battlefield images, and reassurance campaigns, creating a parallel struggle over credibility and control.100 For JNIM, media visibility is therefore operationally useful—it turns tactical violence into a wider political signal and allows the group to contest the state’s claim to authority even when it does not hold the ground it attacks.
Vulnerabilities of Transnational Militant Networks

The same characteristics that make transnational militant movements resilient also generate inherent vulnerabilities. Networks aligned with al-Qaeda or IS are intensely ideological, transnational, and expansionist—traits that sustain endurance but, over time, can strain cohesion, generate internal tensions, and provoke counter-mobilization. These vulnerabilities create openings for states, but only when military pressure is targeted, sustained, and followed by civilian protection, restored administration, and credible local governance.

Ideological commitment provides purpose, cohesion, and a basis for recruitment. Yet when doctrine hardens into absolutism, it narrows appeal, encourages excessive coercion, and creates openings for factional rupture. The Lake Chad Basin illustrates this vulnerability. Under Abubakar Shekau, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, commonly known as Boko Haram and referred to here as JAS, embraced a more expansive logic of violence, treating broad categories of civilians, Muslim communities, local authorities, and rival militants as legitimate targets. That approach sustained fear and discipline among loyalists, but it also generated dissent over command style, civilian targeting, and the conduct of war. This dissent contributed to a factional rupture that produced ISWAP, which challenged JAS not only militarily but also through a competing model of insurgent rule.101

Coercive governance deepens these pressures. Armed groups need revenue, supplies, intelligence, and compliance, but the practices used to obtain them often strain the relationships on which durable influence depends. Taxation, forced recruitment, livestock seizure, kidnapping, road control, and interference in farming, fishing, mining, and trade routes sustain operations in the short term while generating resentment over time. The JAS-ISWAP rivalry shows how disputes over civilian targeting, predation, discipline, taxation, and the organization of rule can produce competing models of insurgent authority as well as internecine fighting.

JNIM’s current expansion presents a related danger. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, offers a warning, not least because JNIM emerged in 2017 from the merger of AQIM’s Sahara branch with Ansar Dine, al-Mourabitoun, and Katiba Macina. The lineage matters. JNIM inherited not only al-Qaeda’s ideological frame and regional networks, but also the organizational dilemmas that accompanied earlier Sahelian expansion. As AQIM pushed into West Africa, it gained reach, revenue, and sanctuary, but it also became more dependent on semiautonomous commanders, smuggling relationships, kidnapping economies, and local alliances that were difficult to control from above. Over time, those advantages contributed to fragmentation and rivalry.

JNIM has so far managed expansion more effectively, but the underlying pressures remain. Moving into new borderlands gives the movement recruits, supply routes, fallback zones, and additional fronts against state forces. Expansion also increases dependence on local facilitators, revenue brokers, commanders, and community arrangements that can pull the organization in different directions.102 The danger for JNIM is that expansion gradually multiplies the actors, interests, and local bargains that central leaders must manage to keep the movement coherent.

Whether JNIM’s expansion produces durable gains depends on whether it can manage these internal strains while converting territorial reach into stable authority. Other transnational militant movements suggest that lasting control usually depends on two broader conditions. The first is external sponsorship. During the 1980s, external backing helped sustain Afghan mujahideen103 resistance to the Soviet Union; later, Pakistan’s sanctuary, training, and material support proved critical to the Taliban’s resurgence after 2001 and eventual return to power in 2021. Yet this outcome was also contingent on state fragility. Afghanistan’s over-centralized political system, weak governance, and dependence on external support had already eroded legitimacy.104 When external protection receded, the Taliban capitalized on an existing vacuum.

JNIM and IS-Sahel lack comparable levels of sustained external backing. Their links to al-Qaeda and Islamic State networks provide ideological affiliation, branding, propaganda value, and channels for tactical learning, but they do not amount to a protected rear base, state sanctuary, or large-scale material pipeline comparable to the Afghan mujahideen and Taliban cases. Their endurance depends instead on local taxation, illicit economies, captured weapons, cross-border logistics, coercive governance, and relationships with local intermediaries. This makes their expansion vulnerable to pressure on revenue systems, supply chains, commanders, facilitators, and the local arrangements that allow them to operate.

The second pathway rests on localized adaptation. In Syria, militant groups extended their control by maintaining ideological credibility with core supporters and simultaneously adapting to local political realities to broaden their base of operations. In December 2024, a broader rebel coalition, anchored by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) but involving a wider set of armed factions, toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. HTS’s role in that outcome reflected years of political and organizational adaptation, not battlefield strength alone. After breaking from the Islamic State in 2013 and distancing itself from al-Qaeda in 2016, the group repositioned itself as a locally rooted political-military actor. Its leadership pursued a pragmatic approach that emphasized administration, alliance-building, and local integration over rigid ideological expansion.105

JNIM has moved partly along this second pathway, but not to the same degree. In parts of Mali, it combines coercion with dispute resolution, taxation, and pragmatic engagement with local armed actors. Its coordination with the FLA also shows tactical flexibility when cooperation serves the shared objective of weakening Bamako. But JNIM has not completed an HTS-style transformation. It remains formally tied to al-Qaeda, and has not built the kind of localized political-administrative apparatus or public posture that allowed HTS to present itself as a governing authority in northwest Syria. Its trajectory is adaptive but incomplete.

In West Africa—where neither sustained external sponsorship nor comparable ideological moderation has yet emerged—governments retain a strategic window to exploit these vulnerabilities. Doing so, however, will depend on whether states can apply sustained, intelligence-led military pressure in selective places, while protecting civilians and rebuilding governance in contested areas once militant presence has been reduced. The latter task remains essential to disrupting militant entrenchment and reversing the expansion of these groups’ parallel authority.

Operational Effectiveness, Civilian Protection, and Durable Authority

Militant expansion in West Africa has been uneven, and state responses have been as well. Although the pattern is not one of uniform failure, states have struggled to translate tactical and operational success into long-term progress against violent militant groups. Troops are deployed, but only temporarily; warning occurs but is not translated into timely action; equipment is procured but not absorbed into functioning systems; military pressure is used, but rarely consolidated into durable civilian protection and effective provision of security on the ground.

To address this key weakness, the region’s military forces must do four things: convert presence into persistence, convert information into action, convert force into legitimacy, and convert national effort into regional effect. Across all four tasks, civilian protection emerges consistently as the strategic center of gravity, and the key indicator of whether force is being translated into durable authority.

Together, these shifts could transform operational capability into sustained political success against violent militancy and durable political authority that leaves no room for militant groups to re-penetrate. The four tasks also reinforce each other. Forces that can deploy, remain, and consolidate control enable sustained pressure. Intelligence that moves rapidly across institutions supports timely decision-making and targeted operations. Civilian protection strengthens cooperation, improves information flows, and anchors authority locally. Aligned, these elements give West African states an opportunity to contain, and then gradually reverse, militant group expansion.106

Converting Presence into Persistence

To convert presence into persistent political authority, West African states must rethink their deployment models. Despite significant investment in forward operating bases and northern defenses in places like Benin,107 security architecture remains insufficiently robust. Officers consistently point to a thin operational footprint in key border zones, overstretched supply lines, and installations positioned too far from high-risk areas to enable rapid reaction, all of which militants exploit through hit-and-run tactics.

A consistent distinction emerges between infrastructure and persistence. Forward bases alone do not produce control unless they are embedded in systems that link mobility, logistics, and command authority to sustain presence under pressure.108 As several officers noted, reaching a contested area is insufficient if forces cannot remain, protect civilians, and consolidate gains.109 Practitioners emphasize the need to shorten decision cycles, strengthen forward command posts, and pair mobility with credible strike-and-hold capacity.

Sustained presence also requires mobility: Units must operate across difficult terrain with real-time intelligence, decentralized logistics, and the autonomy to act quickly. This is particularly evident in the Lake Chad Basin, where militants exploit waterways and marshlands as protected staging areas. Effective deployment in such environments depends on closely linked forward bases supported by riverine and amphibious capabilities.110

In Côte d’Ivoire, partial adaptation toward these objectives is underway. Following attacks in 2016 and 2020, the country has shifted toward a more integrated defensive posture under unified operational command, improving territorial coverage and contributing to a significant decline in attacks.111 Crucially, improved presence has been tied not only to force deployment but to coordination, intelligence integration, and continuous posture adjustment. Moreover, mobility has been improved not just by having vehicles, but investing in the systems that sustain them—roads, maintenance, fuel, medical support, and technical capacity to operate in difficult terrain. Persistent impact has therefore depended as much on enabling infrastructure and organizational coherence as on troop numbers.

In Nigeria, by contrast, misallocation of manpower and suboptimal deployment choices have limited the state’s efficacy against militancy. Soldiers are often tied down in roadblocks, checkpoints, and substitute-policing roles that do little to disrupt militant networks.112 Ongoing discussions about transferring such responsibilities to police and civil-defense forces reflect a growing recognition: The military cannot simultaneously perform routine internal-security tasks and dominate contested terrain.113 Recent initiatives—including expanded police recruitment114 and the creation of a 36,000-strong forest guard force115—may help rebalance this burden, but only if the institutions expected to assume these roles are sufficiently capable.

Professionalization and institutionalization of learning have also played a role. Several Ivorian officers have noted that endurance depends on maintaining combat effectiveness through continuous cycles of recruitment, training, rotation, and rest.116 Forces that remain under sustained stress without institutional learning also gradually lose adaptability. Endurance therefore depends on whether units can be renewed, retrained, and sustained over time.

West Africa’s forces must improve their ability to respond rapidly, reinforce effectively, and sustain operations over time.117 Where these conditions are absent, even if troop numbers seem sufficient, deployments remain vulnerable to bypass, isolation, or defeat by violent militants.

Converting Information into Action

Across West Africa, militaries struggle to translate fragmented information into timely action. Warning often exists—what fails is the system meant to act on it.118 Intelligence—too often a specialized afterthought in the region today—must become a systemic capability. To do this, military academies and specialized schools need to institutionalize training in drone operations, geospatial mapping, encrypted communications, and rapid decision-making. After-action reviews must also be used to improve the use of intelligence in counter-militant operations; unless battlefield lessons are systematically captured and translated into operational practice, adaptation remains episodic and intelligence systems will not improve at the speed required for a mobile adversary.119

Côte d’Ivoire illustrates how this gap can be addressed. Following attacks in 2020 and 2021, officials identified bureaucracy, interservice rivalry, and weak cross-agency authority as key obstacles. The creation of a Counterterrorism Operational Intelligence Center (CROAT) responded directly to these challenges by requiring agencies to collaborate under centralized operational authority.120 A senior intelligence officer described the resulting system in practical terms: Effective intelligence requires a coordinating body with real authority, procedures that enable timely sharing without undermining institutional ownership, and a focus on operational outcomes, including prevention, targeting, and rapid response.121

At the field level in Benin, similar lessons have been demonstrated. When local warning exists, the decisive question is whether the chain from alert to action is short enough to prevent the warned-of attack from occurring. Where it is not, even fortified positions remain vulnerable. A former deputy chief of defense emphasized that shortening the alert-to-action chain demands operators capable of using surveillance systems in real time; commanders empowered and trained to act on intelligence with autonomy; and institutions able to fuse diverse inputs—patrol reports, community alerts, drone imagery, and open-source data—into actionable decisions.122

Effective warning also depends on an additional factor: whether communities are willing to share information, which they will do only when they believe the state can protect them. Human intelligence depends on trust, and that trust erodes quickly when communities are treated as suspects rather than partners.123 Converting information into action therefore leads directly to the next challenge: converting force into legitimacy.

Converting Force into Legitimacy

Civilian protection is the main mechanism by which force is translated into sustained political authority. It is not an auxiliary concern appended to strategy, and tactical success does not translate automatically into authority. Legitimacy is produced operationally, through repeated interactions in which communities assess whether security forces protect without predation and enforce without collective punishment. Civilians judge who provides predictable security, resolves disputes, and enables economic life. Campaigns that rely heavily on force without addressing these concerns, therefore, may disrupt militant activity temporarily, but rarely produce durable outcomes.

Benin and Côte d’Ivoire illustrate both the importance and fragility of this relationship. One of Côte d’Ivoire’s key advantages has been maintaining a broadly supportive population in the north, supported by sustained investment in governance, services, and local integration.124 In Benin, officials have been more concerned that fear, communal suspicion, and doubts about state protection could weaken cooperation in exposed border areas. The risk is especially acute where pastoralist and cross-border communities fear being collectively stigmatized or left vulnerable to militant retaliation. A former Beninese border official captured the dynamic succinctly: Communities often remain silent not because they support militants, but because they doubt the state can protect them. Trust, in this view, must be built through a sequence—listening, responding, and protecting—rather than through intelligence extraction alone.125

Across coastal states—including Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Senegal—governments have begun institutionalizing parts of this approach.126 Dialogue mechanisms linking security forces, civil authorities, and communities aim to build trust before crises escalate.127 These initiatives have thus far varied in effectiveness, but they reflect the shared recognition that legitimacy cannot be improvised after an attack.

Lasting security also depends on addressing the structural conditions that degrade civilian perceptions of government legitimacy and enable militant recruitment. Poverty, exclusion, and unresolved local conflicts remain central to the environments in which militancy persists. Job creation, infrastructure repair, and inclusive governance are therefore core elements of strategy. Their feasibility, however, depends on the local balance of control. In heavily contested areas, even basic-service delivery remains difficult. Quick-impact interventions are most effective where states have reestablished at least partial control, allowing security gains to translate into visible public benefits and renewed confidence in state authority.

Converting National Effort into Regional Effect

Even where trust improves, gains remain fragile if militants retain cross-border sanctuary and mobility. The final challenge is therefore regional: aligning national responses with the cross-border nature of the threat. As long as militant groups operate fluidly across borders, exploiting gaps in coordination and differences in national strategies, pressure in one area risks displacement into another, reducing any permanent gains.

To date, regional coordination against militant operations has taken many forms—multilateral, trilateral, and bilateral—but few mechanisms have consistently produced sustained operational results. Broad frameworks such as ECOWAS128 and the Accra Initiative have struggled with political division, uneven commitment, and slow implementation,129 constraining these organizations’ ability to translate formal agreements into operational impact. Efforts like the G5 Sahel Joint Force, by contrast, have experienced funding shortfalls, problems with overreliance on external partners, and limited intelligence and air support.130

As a result, the region has experienced a gradual shift toward smaller, more adaptive arrangements built around shared threats, geographic proximity, and clearer political alignment. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) reflects this turn toward sovereignty-centered security cooperation among Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. Its Unified Force—launched in December 2025, headquartered in Niamey, and estimated at roughly 6,000 personnel131—is designed to operate across member territories under a more centralized structure, addressing weaknesses that undermined earlier initiatives. Financially, it also seeks to reduce reliance on external partners, drawing on national funds and a regional import levy (0.5 percent) agreed on in 2025.

These arrangements have begun to strengthen autonomy and cohesion,132 but do not resolve some of the central constraints: Militant networks, trafficking routes, and support systems extend beyond AES territory, and operational priorities among member states still diverge.133

West Africa has, however, found success when cooperation is anchored in concrete operational needs rather than formal institutional design. The May–June 2024 Tarha Nakal exercise in Tillia, Niger, for example, involved roughly 1,500 troops from multiple countries, and illustrated how joint training can improve interoperability and tactical cohesion through shared scenarios such as ambush response and casualty evacuation.134 Indeed, the most effective cooperation within the region has been localized and problem-driven. Coordination along key border zones—such as the Mali-Mauritania-Senegal corridor—demonstrates that intelligence sharing, joint patrols, and direct communication between neighboring forces matter when they are routine enough to close operational gaps over time, not just when they generate faster responses.135 Senegal’s cooperation with Mauritania, including joint patrols and more recent maritime and riverine coordination, points in the same direction,136 as do quieter mechanisms such as liaison officers, direct commander-to-commander communication, and rotating intelligence exchanges.137

Regional security efforts must be layered. Multilateral structures provide strategic direction and legitimacy, but operational effectiveness depends on flexible coordination at bilateral and subregional levels. And that effectiveness is measured not by institutional scale, but by whether cooperation produces timely information sharing, clear operational roles, and sustained action in the areas where militant groups move, regroup, and recover, as these are the patterns of activity that will create sustained security for civilian populations on the ground.

From Operational Effect to Political Leverage

The four conversions outlined in this article should be understood as mutually reinforcing parts of a single strategy. Faster movement from warning to response reduces predictability and gives state forces a better chance of acting before attacks occur. Persistent presence makes it harder for violent militant groups to exit, reorganize, and return once pressure fades. Civilian protection strengthens cooperation and weakens the intimidation on which armed actors depend. Regional coordination reduces the advantage militants gain from crossing borders to evade pursuit. Taken together, these changes shift state action from episodic disruption toward continuous pressure.

That shift can gradually reshape the incentives surrounding the conflict. If states can protect communities, hold strategic areas, restrict access to revenue and recruitment networks, and restore administration that populations regard as credible, violent militant groups lose many of the key conditions that allow them to claim authority, impose compliance, or present themselves as providers of order. Sustained pressure can also weaken the internal bonds that keep armed organizations intact, including material incentives, protection, ideological confidence, command discipline, and belief in eventual success.138 This pressure may increase incentives for some fighters, local commanders, intermediaries, or community-linked factions to consider less violent options including exit, compromise, local moderation, and engagement with state authorities.

Emphasizing civilian protection and state construction of effective political order on the ground does not mean that political engagement is a substitute for operational effectiveness. And in West Africa, violent militant groups have not yet been placed under enough sustained pressure for these pathways to be broadly credible.139 Militant groups still retain mobility, income streams, coercive reach, and local embedding across many contested areas. The region’s immediate priority, therefore, is to improve operational effectiveness, civilian protection, and governance so that the balance of leverage begins to shift, and wider efforts to find a political settlement become more than temporary pauses or short-term tactical concessions. Operational effectiveness is not separate from political strategy; it is what makes a long-term political strategy viable.

Conclusion

States across West Africa have deployed forces, acquired equipment, launched operations, and expanded security cooperation to confront violent militant groups. Their lack of success is not due to inactivity, yet they have failed to generate durable control over territory, civilian confidence, or political leverage. The gap lies in the conversion of capacity into effect: Forces fight, but too often cannot remain; they collect information, but cannot act quickly enough; they clear areas, but cannot prevent militant return.

At the operational level, West African forces remain overly tied to fixed positions, predictable routes, and reactive deployments. They lack the mobility, surveillance, logistics, and command systems needed to pursue mobile adversaries and sustain pressure in contested areas. Intelligence often exists, but moves too slowly across institutions to shape decisions in real time. Equipment is acquired, but not always absorbed into systems of maintenance, training, rotation, and operational learning. Under these conditions, tactical activity produces disruption without consolidation.

The record of counter-militant performance across the region, however, is uneven rather than uniformly bleak. Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania show that militant expansion can be contained when military and security measures are embedded in a wider strategy of protection, prevention, and credible state presence. Côte d’Ivoire has responded to pressure along its northern border by reinforcing border deployments, improving intelligence and surveillance capacity, and pairing security measures with social investment in vulnerable border communities.140 Mauritania has combined mobile desert units and tighter border controls with religious engagement, reintegration support, and efforts to extend basic services into remote areas.141 Neither case offers an off-the-shelf, universal model for countering violent militant groups, but both cases demonstrate that better outcomes are possible when states move beyond episodic force and build broader systems that reduce militant room for maneuver.

Operational effectiveness must therefore be understood politically. Military action can create openings, but does not produce lasting authority unless it is followed by credible protection, effective administration, and predictable engagement with local populations. Civilians judge the state not by the number of operations it conducts, but by whether it can protect them, resolve disputes, preserve livelihoods, and remain present after the fighting ends. Civilian protection is therefore not a secondary humanitarian concern, but one of the main ways in which force becomes intelligence, cooperation, legitimacy, and ultimately, durable political authority.

This protection is especially important in areas where militant groups have become embedded in local economies. Across much of the region, livelihoods depend on informal trade, mobility, mining, herding, and transport networks that militant groups exploit through taxation, regulation, and coercion. Reasserting state authority cannot mean simply closing these spaces down, because doing so would disrupt militant logistics in the short term but alienate communities and risk deepening dependence on armed intermediaries for survival. Rather, West African states should seek to regulate these economies credibly, preserve livelihoods where possible, and reduce the ability of militants to act as gatekeepers.

External partners can also influence whether such approaches take root. Assistance that focuses mainly on equipment transfers, short training cycles, or visible operational outputs risks reinforcing the same reactive patterns that have produced limited results so far. More useful support would strengthen the underlying systems that allow states to sustain pressure: mobility, logistics, intelligence fusion, maintenance, command authority, accountable leadership, and civilian protection. Efficacy of security-force assistance should be measured not by body counts, number of patrols, or whether more matériel has been delivered. Rather, it should be measured by whether forces can hold key routes, reinforce exposed units, act on warning before attacks occur, maintain civilian cooperation, protect civilians from harm, reduce militant taxation, and restore administration in contested areas. These measures better capture whether military activity is being converted into durable security.

Ultimately, the struggle against militant groups in West Africa will not be decided by the use of force alone, but by whether force is used in ways that create the conditions for a viable political strategy. Where states can move, persist, protect, and govern, militant groups face tighter constraints, and future settlement pathways become more credible. Where these elements remain disconnected, armed groups will continue to exploit gaps in mobility, trust, and response, making them not only likely to survive, but to grow and expand their challenges to state power and human security. The task, then, is not simply to fight harder; it is to fight in ways that allow states to hold, protect, and build the leverage required for durable outcomes.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

US Migrant Flights To Liberia Evoke Troubling History Of Sending People Deemed Unwanted To The West African Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 10:19:22 -0700

Liberian national police officers stand guard awaiting a plane carrying migrants deported from the United States to land in Harbel, Liberia, on Aug. 20, 2026. Matthew Jacobs / AFP via Getty Images

BY KAREN MASTERSON

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM,

UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

The Supreme Court’s recent decision to temporarily allow the United States to resume deporting migrants to third-country destinations could see the resumption of flights to Liberia.

About the size of Ohio, the West African country is one of 35 countries the Trump administration is paying to shelter and feed Latin Americans and others living in the U.S. without proper legal status. Some of those receiving nations have a reputation for corruption and human rights abuses, and in most cases, those being deported have no links to the host nation.

The policy may ultimately be deemed unconstitutional, but on Sept. 29, 2026, the Supreme Court justices gave the green light for flights to continue while they consider the policy’s legality.

So far, at least 20 U.S. deportees have been flown to Liberia. One Colombian national who arrived in the African nation on Aug. 20 told PBS: “Honestly, I had never heard of Liberia.”

While those being deported to Liberia may not be familiar with the country, the same can’t be said for American policymakers. Unlike the other countries participating in the Trump administration’s efforts, Liberia has a long history with American immigration policy.

As a scholar who has written about that history, I see echoes of past U.S. efforts to move nonwhite people to Liberia in the latest removals. Indeed, it is those past events that gave Liberia its name.

Liberia’s American roots

In the early 1800s, Africa’s west coast attracted American leaders who were looking for a place to send those they viewed as unwanted U.S. residents: free people of African descent.

The region became the endpoint for America’s first massive removal campaign, starting in 1820, focused on relocating Black people “back to Africa.” The chief U.S. organization advocating for this effort was the American Colonization Society, created in 1816.

The initial wave of departures was made up of African American intellectuals, church leaders and merchants. The brutality and inhumanity that white Americans inflicted on free and enslaved Black people drove them out. Many abolitionists and Quakers – who fought to ban slavery – initially supported the colonization society’s removal efforts as a means for helping Black residents escape the cruelty of American laws, especially the Fugitive Slave Acts.

But the true driving force was the slaveholder class, which held a majority in Congress. Those politicians demanded the deportations because they knew the presence of free Black people gave hope to the millions in bondage — who, in some states, outnumbered white people.

These early American settlers named their new home Liberia, for liberty. And by 1847, they fought the colonization society’s control over the land and turned the settlement into the first independent republic in Africa. They set up towns and farms along the coastline, which had local indigenous communities estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

By the end of the century, some 16,000 Black Americans made the journey, many against their will and all on the promise of a better life. Thousands more joined them, some from the Caribbean and at least 6,000 who were rescued from slave-trading vessels, intercepted and sent to Liberia by the U.S. Navy.

A promised land

The colonization society’s mass deportation plan was a nationwide effort with powerful political leaders and slaveholders like Henry Clay, who was a U.S. senator, speaker of the House, secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate; Francis Scott Key, a famous U.S. attorney best known for writing “The Star Spangled Banner”; and Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court justice and nephew of George Washington.

Ten Southern state legislatures endorsed the idea by passing laws that allowed the freeing of an enslaved person only when deportation out of the state was arranged and paid for. The colonization society raised the funds to pay for their removal to Liberia.

Some abolitionists and future leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, at first supported colonization because they believed it would help accelerate emancipation. But over time, and especially during the Civil War, most instead supported citizen rights for Black residents.

The effort was also opposed by powerful public intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, who helped convince many — including Lincoln — of the need to secure freedom and justice for Black people in a country where they already lived.

At least 20% of those who made the journey to Liberia in the 1800s died of malaria. The rest dealt with supply shortages, severe weather, failed crops and hostility from indigenous communities.

But most white Americans knew none of this. They were told Liberia had fertile soil and a healthy climate; it was a promised land for Black people wishing to go home.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her best-selling novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” furthered this notion by having her main characters, on a hair-raising and violent odyssey to escape enslavement, finally find freedom and peace on a boat headed to Liberia.

Douglass praised her novel in his newspaper, but for this last part of it, which he vehemently opposed. Douglass wrote to Stowe: “We are here, and here we are likely to remain. … We have grown up with this Republic; and I see nothing in our character … which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.”

A lingering US legacy

The American Colonization Society’s strong influence on deportations ended with the Civil War, though the organization continued raising money and influencing U.S. policy until it was dissolved in 1964.

Other independent waves of migration to Liberia followed, especially as the end of Reconstruction unleashed white-led terrorism against Black communities throughout the South. This included the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, a Black-owned business that transported well-off African Americans to Liberia in 1878. Its schooner carried some of Liberia’s soon-to-be-famous families from Charleston, South Carolina, to Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.

In my view, what they accomplished along West Africa’s windward coast is astounding and, unfortunately, forgotten by most Americans. I’ve collected thousands of records from archives, including the U.S. National Archives, that show how surviving “Americo-Liberians,” as they called themselves, used grit and ingenuity to build large farming operations, grow merchant fleets, establish fisheries and spur other industries in their efforts to be integrated into Western global markets.

Yet for all the successes in difficult circumstances, Liberia in the 20th century remained in America’s shadow. After decades of fending off European attempts to absorb it into their colonial holdings, Liberia sought refuge in its historical relationship with the U.S. And in the 1920s, the two countries began a “special friendship.” At a time when Jim Crow laws ravaged the American South, U.S. business interests created a plantation economy in Liberia rooted in resource extraction that enriched large U.S. companies, including Firestone Tire and Republic Steel.

Archival records show the corruption that grew from deals benefiting the few at the expense of the many that became a long-term driver in the country’s political instability, resulting in civil strife and poverty that has wracked the country for decades.

Coming full circle

For many of the 1,200 people earmarked for deportation to Liberia in the coming months by the U.S. government, landing in the capital, Monrovia, may feel cruel. That it was once a thriving city of Black elites whose forebearers arrived there from America may feel meaningless.

The circumstances of their deportations to Liberia are obviously very different form earlier waves. Those being deported today weren’t captured and sold into bondage; many left home to escape civil war, gang violence or starvation.

But there is a common driver between American policymakers now and those in the 19th century in encouraging and enforcing deportation to Liberia: a desire to rid the U.S. of nonwhite people deemed to represent a problem at home.

In December 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments and ultimately decide the constitutionality of this desire, as written into today’s rapid deportation policies.

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Hunter‑Gatherer Societies Are Often Put On A Pedestal As Paragons Of Equality – But The Reality Is More Complicated

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 4 Oct 2026 20:37:29 -0700

Most Hadza hunting is done solo, but the meat is shared with everyone. Duncan Stibbard Hawkes

BY DUNAN STIBBARD HAWKES AND CHRISTOPHER VON RUEDEN

On the shores of Lake Eyasi in Northern Tanzania, a small number of people still hunt and gather their food. Today a Hadza hunter has taken down an animal – a kudu. He can’t carry it by himself, so he cuts his poisoned arrow from its flank, covers the carcass in dry grass to hide it from hyenas and heads home to enlist help.

News spreads like wildfire across the camp. Everybody rushes to the kill. They divide up the carcass, carry it back, then divvy it up some more. Every family gets some, and after the meat is cooked, there’s more sharing still. On a good day like today, the hunter and his family retain half, but sometimes they keep much less. People may even walk from other camps, and almost everyone, from miles around, is entitled to a share.

The post-hunt scene above is idyllic. It paints a quintessential picture of egalitarianism and equality. But our experience as anthropologists working with the Hadza people of Tanzania and with the Tsimane people of Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest is that inequalities are part of even the most equal of societies. Furthermore, the equalities that do exist often emerge from selfish motives.

Insights like ours are revising researchers’ understanding of both the past and how people operate today, as inequality grows globally. Hunter-gatherers are often at the center of heated academic battles about what it means to be human, including debates over gender, war and peace and whether humans are, by nature, egalitarian or hierarchical.

Sometimes these debates oversimplify. So we pulled together hundreds of different sources covering more than a century of ethnography to find out just how egalitarian hunter-gatherer and other subsistence societies really are.

Is any society truly egalitarian?

Anthropologists have called hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza “egalitarian societies,” with equalities of power, wealth and social status. And it’s true that the traditional subsistence communities we work with successfully limit many inequalities.

Most families have similar, modest possessions and store little material wealth. When leaders do emerge, they are highly constrained in how they can direct other people. People often make decisions via consensus, and, if they cannot reach agreement, families will move away.

While the same anthropologists also emphasize that some hunter-gatherers are very unequal and that equality takes deliberate effort, the prevailing impression is that equality characterizes hunter-gatherers, past and present.

A quick trip to your local bookshop will reveal grand claims, including that past hunter-gatherer societies had no permanent leadership and no hierarchy, inequality only spread with the development of agriculture, and humans are noble by nature.

Some scientists are pushing back against these utopian portrayals. The popular bestseller, “The Dawn of Everything,” calls egalitarianism a “Garden of Eden narrative” that lacks substance. Other scholars have called egalitarian societies a scientific origin myth.

So where does the truth lie? Probably somewhere in between.

Inequality among hunter-gatherers

In our recent wide-ranging review of the evidence from the early 20th century onward, we found that no society lacked inequality.

Like the Hadza, the Ju/’Hoansi of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa had little property and widespread food-sharing, yet certain families controlled valuable hunting territory surrounding waterholes. The Bayaka of the central African rainforest had little material inequality, yet they bought, sold and hoarded ritual knowledge. The Philippine Agta controlled and arranged their children’s marriages, hugely discriminating against orphans.

Gender inequalities were commonplace. The Tanzanian Hadza keep certain cuts of meat exclusively for older men, and give more respect to better hunters. Across societies, women have universally done more direct parenting, and men have participated more frequently in community-level decision-making.

No society lacks informal leadership. Age was another source of inequality. In many Australian societies, older men controlled ritual secrets and had power over the marriage choices of younger relatives.

Equality arises from self-interest

Our study also found that although hunter-gatherers are frequently generous, the processes limiting inequality often do not require any generosity. Instead, equality often results from people’s self-interested motives to acquire resources, status and autonomy.

A great example of this is food-sharing. Although each Hadza family gets a cut of kudu meat, it often happens not because the hunter’s family prioritizes total equality, but because other families request it vociferously. It can involve more taking than giving, often through strongly stated demands or complaints.

Another example is ridicule and mockery of stingy or braggadocious individuals, which keeps greed and bravado in check. Paradoxically, status-seeking can also promote equality, when cooperating to gain status diffuses status throughout the community.

Egalitarianism is alive and well

Many of these inequality-reducing processes are familiar to people everywhere.

Ridicule and mockery are ubiquitous in industrialized societies, from political cartoons to social media. Lampooning authority is even common in autocratic societies where governments spend large sums of money suppressing speech. Demands and complaints form the basis of strikes and collective bargaining. And key to social mobility is cooperation among people of different social strata.

Like many great debates, the truth is complex: Our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t reach the giddy heights of inequality seen in other societies over the last 6,000 years, but putting hunter-gatherers on a pedestal as paragons of equality is a mistake. Sweeping statements about equality in the past blind us to the tools that probably allowed ancient hunter-gatherers to combat inequality, just as they and people in all societies do today.

Egalitarianism, then, is best seen not as perfect equality but as a set of tools that people use to secure their own autonomy and access to resources. Equality along one dimension or another might be the outcome, but it doesn’t rely on people being amazingly noble or completely lacking in greed or status-seeking. If you consider egalitarianism as equality-creating processes, you can see that it is a widespread reality among hunter-gatherer societies, and beyond.

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Ecowas Court And Women’s Rights In West Africa: What’s Working – And What Isn’t

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 4 Oct 2026 07:34:57 -0700

BY MAAME EFUA ADDADZI-KOOM

SENIOR LECTURER, KWAME NKRUMAH

UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND

TECHNOLOGY (KNUST)

The Ecowas Court is a west African regional body located in Abuja, Nigeria, serving the now 12-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). The court, originally set up to handle economic matters related to the Ecowas Treaty, was given a human rights mandate in 2005. Since then, of the hundreds of cases the court has heard, nearly 90% have been human rights-related. In a recent book, international law and human rights scholar Maame Efua Addadzi-Koom argues that the shift in the court’s mandate has made it an accessible forum for advancing women’s rights. Some of its landmark decisions have challenged discrimination and violence against women.
Why is the court so important for women’s rights in west Africa?

The court has become the preferred destination for west Africans litigating human rights issues against their governments. As I set out in my book, this has begun to happen since it was given its human rights mandate in 2005.

A key attraction of the Ecowas Court is its accessibility: plaintiffs do not have to go through all the judicial avenues available in their country before they can bring their action to the court. This is the case with other regional tribunals on the continent.

This accessibility has been enhanced by electronic filing and case management systems.

What key decisions has it made about the rights of women?

It’s made key decisions in areas like marriage, widowhood, domestic violence, employment, school, culture and conflict situations. An example is the 2019 decision of Women Against Violence and Exploitation in Society (WAVES) and Child Welfare Society, Sierra Leone (CWS-SL) v. The Republic of Sierra Leone (the “Waves” case).

This was a public interest litigation case against Sierra Leone, where a non-governmental organisation filed the action on behalf of an estimated 3,000 pregnant schoolgirls. Sierra Leone had banned pregnant schoolgirls from attending mainstream schools and offered them substandard education in “alternative” schools.

Waves argued that the arrangement denied the girls equal access to education on the basis of their pregnancy status. The court ordered Sierra Leone to revoke the ban and close down the alternative schools.

How enforceable are its decisions?

The court is working to improve the enforcement of its decisions. It has an enforcement plan – member states are to set up a national authority to receive and enforce the court’s decisions. Not all member states have done so. Eight out of the 12 Ecowas member states have not complied with the arrangement.

Even among those that have set up a national authority, records show that some are among the countries with the highest number of unenforced judgments. Nigeria, home of the Ecowas Court, is one example.

That said, there are instances of decisions being enforced in part. For example, the Waves case. I attribute Sierra Leone’s partial compliance to the public-interest nature of the case, which led to systemic remedies (fixing the broken system in the country) rather than monetary remedies (compensation for individual victims), and the publicity such litigation generates.
What weaknesses still need to be addressed?

A gap I note in the book is the uncertainty surrounding the monetary compensation the court awards in women’s rights cases. It is one thing for women to receive a favourable judicial declaration that their rights have been violated, and another to be unsure of the “price tag” the court will place on those rights.

The “price tag” is equally important, and the lack of uniformity diminishes predictability, a determining factor in effective compensation.

I also observe that there is minimal mention of the Maputo Protocol by the Ecowas Court in most of its women’s rights decisions, the 2025 case of Forum Against Harmful Practices and Others v. Republic of Sierra Leone being an exception. The Maputo Protocol is the African Bill of Rights for Women, adopted in 2003. It is the first regional human rights treaty specifically designed for women.

In most of the decisions analysed in the book, the court mentions the Maputo Protocol only briefly and does not rely on it heavily. This is troubling because, among international human rights instruments for women, the Maputo Protocol is best suited to African women and girls because of its comprehensive scope and distinctive nature.

If it’s not used, its impact is diminished.

How can the court transform women’s rights in the region?

The Ecowas Court is already doing a great job advancing women’s rights in the region, but its work would be even more transformative if it developed a uniform monetary compensation framework and became more intentional about increasing its reliance on the Maputo Protocol.

Public interest litigation is another route to getting the Ecowas Court to deliver systemic, transformative decisions. But the initiative will come from the lawyers submitting cases, not from the court itself.

What does the future hold for women’s rights in the region?

Ecowas has established itself as a fair and receptive regional court where women can trust they will receive justice, even if their own states do not provide it.

The range of women’s rights issues that the court addresses continues to grow. I eagerly anticipate the court’s future handling of a technology-facilitated gender-based violence case when it is eventually presented with one. This is an emerging form of gender-based violence that is partly or fully committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified using technological platforms and other digital media or tools.

Women are particularly affected by this type of violence. As of 2026, it’s estimated that 75% of women globally have experienced it. Therefore, a decision by the Ecowas Court on this matter would help shape the rights of women to be free from violence online.

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