A new history uses records of a local businesswoman’s brush with the Inquisition as a window into everyday life in an Atlantic port town and slave-trading hub under Portuguese colonial rule.
Despite elections being held across the continent, coup leaders and other foes of liberal democracy have seized on disenchantment with poor governance and economic frustrations to renew old debates about whether Africa needs a different kind of political system suited to its supposed cultural differences.
Since 2020, the Sahel region has emerged as the global epicenter of coups d’état and terrorism. This article surveys why coups in recent years have been concentrated in a narrow belt running from Guinea-Bissau on West Africa’s Atlantic coast all the way to Sudan on the continent’s Red Sea coast. Though there is limited evidence of direct coordination or foreign sponsorship, shared causes of Africa’s latest coup wave include “traps” of repeated coup attempts, poverty, worsening terrorism, crises of democratic governance, and an international environment that has grown more favorable to post-coup regimes. Democratic renewal and domestic tranquility remain elusive within the Sahel coup belt, which threatens to keep expanding.
The 2025 youth uprising in Madagascar was a Gen Z–led movement sparked by chronic infrastructure failures and deepening economic precarity. Young Malagasy mobilized digital culture and global symbols to articulate local grievances and coordinate a generational protest. This mobilization represented neither a clean rupture nor a mere repetition of earlier crises, but a form of hybrid agency that is locally grounded yet expressed through transnational digital repertoires. Though the youth movement forced regime change, its horizontal structure struggled to convert protest into durable institutional reform in the context of the enduring “Malagasy paradox” of recurrent political breakdown.
Angola and Mozambique both celebrated fifty years of independence in 2025. The politics of each country have been marked by a fractious past. Both endured internal conflict until the 1990s, as social divisions that were a legacy of Portuguese colonial rule became politicized amid Cold War rivalries. Today, both southern African states are still under the rule of the same parties that declared independence in 1975 and cling to the vestiges of their legitimacy as liberation movements. Formal opposition politics also remains constrained by its origins in nationalist rivalry; a more credible challenge to the incumbents comes from an increasingly lively street politics.
This article examines the complex dynamics of medical discrimination and anti-LGBTIQ exclusion in Cameroon. It uses Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics to demonstrate how same-sex sexuality has been framed as a moral, medical, and political issue from the colonial era to the present day. Cameroonian medical institutions are not merely providers of health care, but a powerful mechanism for perpetuating medical discrimination and social exclusion of queer individuals. The article also foregrounds the various strategies through which LGBTIQ Cameroonians navigate and contest these regimes of exclusion.
When the American activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, his death was mourned by radical conservatives around the world. This outpouring of grief is but one illustration of the expanding and deepening networks of the radical conservative movement. For all their differences, radical conservatives increasingly see themselves as part of a global movement with a shared agenda—united by their perceived persecution by the same global liberal forces. Informed by a long-standing systematic critique of liberal globalization and managerial rule, they envision a multipolar alternative: a civilizational world order that is not only illiberal, but also legitimizes new hierarchies and forms of exclusion despite its purported embrace of cultural differences.
Recent disputes over rights to transboundary water resources, such as those between India and Pakistan or Egypt and Ethiopia, have prompted predictions that increasing water scarcity as a result of climate change could lead to armed conflict. Nationalist and illiberal governments may be more inclined to assert sovereign rights to resources, rejecting international agreements. But the historical record shows that “water wars” have been rare, and that transboundary bodies of water have occasioned cooperation as well as conflict among states.
Pessimism about climate change need not result in resignation and apathy. As with the threat of nuclear annihilation, realistic concern about existential peril can galvanize action.
In eroding democracies around the globe, political leaders are seeking to convert the military into a partisan ally and suppress dissent from officers as they consolidate executive power. This dynamic is on vivid display in the United States, with profound consequences for the behavior and incentives of aspiring authoritarians elsewhere. Donald Trump and his allies are using various tactics to convey that the military’s commitment to their partisan agenda is non-negotiable and to change the ideological composition of the institution. That effort will affect the US military’s professionalism and relationship with society.
Dividing the history of world orders into dominant civilizations misses the diversity of powers that have upheld regional and global stability in different eras.
In two years, the world went from peak foreign aid spending to contemplating a future without aid. Tracing how this happened requires understanding why donors give aid, how aid critics have challenged these rationales, and how international norms have shaped spending trends over the past decade. With a cottage industry of initiatives now rethinking the future of aid and development cooperation, it is no longer radical to be talking about a post-aid future. For better or worse, the contours of a post-aid world are already emerging.
Space agencies and private companies around the world are taking various measures to tap into the new space economy. In Sweden, this is reflected in the construction of a spaceport for launching small satellites into Earth orbit. While these endeavors are sometimes justified by the potential of space infrastructure to address climate change, the Swedish case also highlights how space exploration, commercialization, and militarization can perpetuate colonial legacies. The Swedish rocket launch site and its impact area overlap with the reindeer herding territories of Indigenous communities whose members actively contest the initiative.
Bolivia has long struggled to balance the demands of the global drug control regime, which bans coca cultivation and consumption, with the plant’s deep cultural and economic importance at home. This article traces coca governance from US-backed eradication campaigns to former President Evo Morales’s “coca yes, cocaine no” policy, showing how the Chapare coca unions evolved from targets of repression into powerful political actors. Community-based coca control reduced violence and improved rural livelihoods, but now faces pressure from growing organized crime, diminished international support, and shifting domestic politics. The Bolivian case reveals both the limits of prohibition and the fragile promise of alternative approaches to governing drug crops.
This article contrasts the ways in which the neoliberal Latin American right of the 1990s and today’s new reactionary right have interpreted and used the past. Scholars have studied several dimensions of this transformation. However, the role played by the use and abuse of national histories in this shift has not been carefully examined. While the neoliberal movement embraced universalist market principles and sought to break with the past, today’s radical right reframes history as a key political battleground. The article focuses particularly on how both the colonial era and the years of military rule are reinterpreted historically. It argues that this shift provides the new right with an intellectual basis to redefine citizenship in exclusionary terms.
The second Trump administration’s escalating and violent crackdown is intended to redefine who is allowed to be in the United States.
Port-au-Prince has descended into urban warfare, with armed gangs controlling 90 percent of Haiti’s capital as of October 2025. This violence has displaced 1.4 million people and left thousands dead. Armed with US-sourced weapons and sustained by transnational trafficking networks, the gangs’ territorial conquests reveal how illicit arms flows and money laundering undermine weak states. The crisis challenges conventional development frameworks and demonstrates that urban fragility constitutes a growing global threat. Haiti’s experience offers crucial lessons for policymakers confronting similar dynamics in vulnerable cities worldwide.
This article examines the multifaceted responses of Mexican civil society to rising organized crime and violence, with diverse strategies ranging from nonviolent protests and victim collectives to self-defense groups and communal policing. Citizens face threats from criminal organizations and corrupt state authorities, the transformation of organized crime, and the limitations of the effectiveness of civil society mobilization. A unified and resilient civil society is needed to combat the pervasive influence of organized crime and achieve sustainable justice and security.
The new nations that emerged in the Western Hemisphere had much in common, including republican ideals and mass immigration.
