5 Outstanding West African Restaurants To Know In The US

BY KIMBERLY WILSON

West African cooking has shaped American food culture for centuries. The region spans more than a dozen countries, each with a distinct approach to rice, stews, and spice, from Nigeria’s tomato-based jollof to Senegal’s fish-and-rice thieboudienne and Ghana’s smoky, chile-heavy shito. These traditions traveled to the Americas centuries ago through the transatlantic slave trade, which laid the groundwork for some of the country’s favorite dishes, like gumbo and jambalaya.

Chefs have opened a number of West African restaurants around the country in the past several years. Their menus center around the region’s techniques and flavors, much of it rooted in dishes they ate in their youth.

These five restaurants below have picked up Michelin recognition, James Beard honors, and spots on multiple national best-of lists. Here’s what to know.

1. Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi (Washington, D.C.)

Dōgon, Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant in Washington, D.C., is named after the Dogon people of Mali. It’s a nod to Benjamin Banneker, the Black surveyor tied to the district’s early history who has Dogon ancestry. That history is baked into the restaurant, which Onwuachi runs inside the Marriott’s Potomac Hotel in D.C.

The Hoe Crab, which pairs Chesapeake crab with plantain hoe cakes, aji verde, and a garlic-shito crisp, is one of the restaurant’s most requested dishes. General Manager Michael Woods says the dish draws on Mid-Atlantic, Creole, and Peruvian influences alongside its West African base of Ghanaian shito. It’s that mix which he credits for the dish’s success. The restaurant has also leaned into the area’s culture in other ways, with events and dishes named after the star constellations the Dogon people were known to study. The bar program, developed with D.C. bartender Derek Brown, highlights spirits from Black-owned producers.

2. ChòpnBlọk (Houston)

Ope Amosu built ChòpnBlọk around his Nigerian heritage, but the menu draws on flavors from across West Africa, from Ghana to Senegal to Liberia, alongside dishes from the wider African diaspora. The Trad combines jollof rice, chicken, plantains, and a spiced vegetable mix seasoned with yaji, a Nigerian pepper spice blend, while the Motherland pairs coconut curry, rice, and plantains with a protein of your choice.

Amosu holds an MBA and was twice named a James Beard Award semifinalist. He started the concept in a food hall in 2021 before he opened the restaurant in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood in October 2024. He’s described the restaurant as a way to make West African food feel familiar to a broad audience. The space has regularly hosted events tied to the concept, like the Chopd & Stewd Festival, a celebration of West African food and culture timed to Nigerian Independence Day. ChòpnBlọk holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and was the only Houston restaurant included on The New York Times’ 2025 list of the best restaurants in America.

3. Dakar NOLA (New Orleans)

Serigne Mbaye built Dakar NOLA around the connection between Senegalese and Louisiana Creole cuisines and the food traditions that traveled from West Africa to the American South. Both regions, he says, lean on rice as a base, paired with slow-cooked stews built on layers of flavor. He sees gumbo as a distant cousin of the seafood okra soups found across West Africa, and says that jollof rice and jambalaya were built from the same technique.

“The culinary connections have always been there,” says Mbaye. Trained at the New England Culinary Institute, Mbaye opened his fine-dining destination with business partner Effie Richardson in 2022. The seven-course menu traces that link dish by dish. It opens with a warm, sweetened tea course and moves through plates like a recurring pairing of crab and black-eyed peas finished with a spoonful of palm oil. In 2024, the restaurant received the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. This year, Mbaye won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South.

4. Dept. of Culture (Brooklyn, New York)

Ayo Balogun grew up in Nigeria’s Kwara state, and he built Dept. of Culture around its cooking when the restaurant opened in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2022. There’s one communal table that seats no more than 10 people at a time, and there’s no takeout offered. You have to be there to experience the magic in person. The four-course menu rotates every couple of weeks, but it tends to include a pepper soup made with fish, a version of suya built around mushrooms instead of the usual beef, and pounded yam with egusi, a Nigerian stew made from ground melon seeds. For dessert, there’s dodo, a caramelized sweet plantain that’s popular as a Nigerian street food, served with vanilla ice cream. The restaurant was a James Beard Award nominee for Best New Restaurant in 2023.

5. Two Hommés (Inglewood, California)

In 2022, after they ran pop-ups together for several years, Marcus Yaw Johnson and Abdoulaye Balde opened Two Hommés in Inglewood, California. Johnson’s family background is Ghanaian, and Balde’s is Senegalese, and both influences show up across the menu. The jollof platter, the restaurant’s most consistent seller, is served alongside ribs or a Senegalese smoked lamb shoulder finished with yassa sauce. Another dish is garlic noodles offered alongside a starter of chicken bites coated in a honey-berbere glaze and a side of Ghanaian shito, for those who want heat. The restaurant’s interior was redesigned to create a more polished dining room in 2024.

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Don’t Trust The Name On The PAC

Strategists are giving names to political action committees that are designed to manipulate voters. Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

BY BRIAN SHEPPARD AND ANDREW MOSHIRNIA

Political action committees are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all federal election funding, with about US$6.3 billion raised and $4.8 billion spent since January 2025. But their outsized political influence does not just come from their wallets. It’s also generated from their names.

Political strategists are adopting PAC names that signal the opposite political goals from what those organizations truly intend. They hope to taint voter perception of the candidates or ballot initiatives to which they donate.

And, as our research shows, the strategy is working.

The history of deceptive PAC naming

Typically, PAC names borrow expressions from the party they wish to help, like ActBlue or WinRed, which raised the most money in the 2024 federal election cycle.

Many of those names have been ridiculed for their overreliance on throwaway clichés. In 2012, comedian Stephen Colbert created the PAC Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to prove the point.

But a more sinister custom has emerged. Our research has shown that for the past decade or so, PACs have engaged in what we call “tactical naming,” the practice of giving laws and PACs names designed to manipulate voter perception.

One tactic is to choose a name derived from slogans of the opposing party, falsely signaling ideological kinship to gain the trust of voters from the other side. In 2014, for example, the PAC Americans for Progressive Action provided no support for Democratic candidates. Instead, it gave over $1.3 million to Republican Gabriel Gomez’s 2014 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts.

Examples can be found on both sides of the aisle. The PAC Patriot Majority USA, which sports a gun-toting minuteman logo and foregrounds the word “patriot,” a term that recent research indicates is a strong marker of conservative political identity, ran ads in support of Democratic candidates. It also opposed Republican candidates in multiple states for years.

The PAC Protect Women Ohio Action, Inc. contributed to conservative ads opposing a ballot initiative that limited Ohio’s authority to restrict abortion.

Deceptive PAC naming today

Tactical naming continues in current primaries.

Earlier in this primary cycle, the PACs Real Change and Lead Left ran television ads and mailers in competitive congressional districts attacking Democratic candidates, ostensibly from the left. The ads accused candidates of standing with President Donald Trump, opposing Medicare for all and “cashing in on Trump’s terror.”

To any casual observer, Real Change and Lead Left look like progressive groups holding Democrats accountable. But closer scrutiny reveals something else.

When people subscribed to Real Change’s email list, they received emails confirming their subscriptions that routed through cavalryllc.com. That’s the domain of Cavalry LLC, one of Washington’s premier Republican communications firms, founded by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff.

Cavalry has received more than $10 million from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership. And investigative reports revealed that Caleb Crosby, the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund, founded a political compliance firm that supported personnel at two conservative PACs that used the same unusual address as Lead Left: a Staples store in Tallahassee, Florida.

The science behind the names

It’s tempting to think that this tactic won’t work on the politically savvy people who pay attention to PAC names. But our research shows otherwise.

To test the effects of deceptive PAC names, we conducted a controlled online experiment involving more than 650 participants recruited through Prolific, an online academic research studies platform. The sample was balanced by gender and diverse in age, though participants were somewhat more educated than the general U.S. population.

Participants evaluated four proposed laws before and after learning that each law was sponsored by a PAC. The PAC’s name was manipulated to be either congruent with the law’s ideological direction, incongruent with it or politically neutral. For example, a left-leaning environmental proposal might be sponsored by a PAC called Save the Earth, Americans for Oil or Smith. By comparing participants’ ratings before and after exposure to those names, we measured the extent to which naming alone could alter attitudes toward otherwise identical proposals.

We found that misleading PAC names significantly shifted voter opinion. We also found that PAC names were most effective when they were deceptive. When participants who supported a particular law were told that an incongruently named PAC was sponsoring it, their support for that law dropped sharply, even when the law’s text sat right in front of them.

For example, when people who identified as left-leaning already favored a law that expedited refugee worker rights, their favorability ratings dropped sharply when they learned that the sponsoring PAC had a right-signaling name, Building the Wall. By contrast, learning that an aptly named PAC, Humane Treatment of Migrants, had sponsored the same law did not significantly affect the ratings of left-leaning people and barely affected the ratings of right-leaning people.

Our research also found that stronger partisans are more susceptible to this tactic. The more firmly someone identified with a political party, the greater the swing in their opinion when an inapt PAC name was introduced.

Sophisticated voters are not automatically inoculated – if anything, their stronger priors make them more vulnerable to cues that appear to confirm or threaten their political identity.

What makes this especially troubling is where tactical names appear. Federal regulations require that PACs disclose their names “in a clear and conspicuous manner” in their political advertisements.

One might wonder whether tactical naming is just everyday politics. But weaponizing names introduces a hazard that goes far beyond ordinary negative campaigning.

A Republican group running ads against Democrats is unremarkable. A Republican group pretending to be a Democratic group to run those same ads is something different: It is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the informational environment in which voters decide whom to support.

Can anything be done?

Our research addressed this question, and our conclusions are sobering.

An outright ban on deceptive PAC names would face serious First Amendment obstacles. Naming a PAC is a form of expression that receives constitutional protection.

Courts have been reluctant to allow the government to dictate how political organizations present themselves. In Doctors for a Healthy Montana v. Fox in 2020, a federal district court struck down a Montana law requiring PACs to name themselves in a way that clearly identified the economic or special interest of a majority of their contributors. The court found that the statute did more than require disclosure of factual information; it unconstitutionally dictated “how that information must be packaged to the public.”

Required disclaimers, such as warnings to voters not to treat a PAC’s name as reliable evidence of its political identity, would probably be the most legally viable intervention. Even their constitutionality is uncertain, however.

That leaves two other remedies: transparency journalism and voter skepticism.

The reporting on Real Change PAC, which followed money through shell companies, traced email domains and mapped connections to the Congressional Leadership Fund, is the kind of investigative work that gives voters a fighting chance.

Voters can also follow a simple rule of thumb: When you see a PAC name, don’t treat it as gospel. Ask who is paying for it and who benefits.

Be mindful when the PAC is critical of a person or position that is supported by the very party that the PAC appears to serve. And remember that the most dangerous political actors don’t always attack your political allies.

Sometimes, they just steal their names.

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How Can Governments Tackle Poverty When Climate Change, Conflict And Economic Shocks Hit All At Once?

Flooding in Lekki in Lagos, Nigeria. Ben Iwara, Pexels

BY VIDYA DIWAKA

DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CPAN, RESEARCH

FELLOW, IDS, INSTITUTE OF 

DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Multiple and often overlapping crises such as floods or drought due to climate change, violent conflict and economic instability are creating new forms of vulnerability. Collectively they’re known as a polycrisis. These have severe effects on countries in sub-Saharan Africa with high poverty levels where weak institutions and limited public resources make it harder to respond effectively.

Vidya Diwakar is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and the deputy director of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. Her research focuses on poverty dynamics, violent conflict and intersecting crises, gender and education. She answers questions about her book Poverty in Polycrisis: Dynamic Pathways for Lasting Change.

What gap does your book seek to fill about understanding poverty?

The world now experiences increasingly interconnected crises with climate-related disasters, economic instability and violent conflict. These crises often overlap, and their effects build up to create new forms of vulnerability, making it harder for people to get out of poverty.

Consider the story of Aisha (anonymised), a woman our team interviewed in Borno, Nigeria. Aisha was once a successful farmer. But she now finds herself trapped in poverty after a series of crises. In 2013, Boko Haram killed her husband and three of her children, left her injured, and forced her and her remaining family to flee their village to a nearby settlement for internally displaced people.

Following this, Nigeria’s “cashless policy”, which restricted cash withdrawals to curb corruption, led to cash shortages. Aisha was forced to rely on credit-based sales for the charcoal selling business she had set up, leaving her without an income. The poor rains in Borno during the same year further reduced the ability of her remaining five children to support her financially.

Today, Aisha remains in the settlement camp, trapped in poverty.

In the world we live in, Aisha’s story is far from the exception as more people find themselves trapped in poverty due to compounding crises.

While there is extensive work on poverty and its drivers, the book focuses on how crises interact. The research draws on evidence from 15 high-poverty countries in regions of Africa and Asia. It examines how polycrisis is pushing people already in poverty into deeper deprivation. It also, surprisingly, shows how some people are able to escape poverty in these challenging contexts.

What about the intersection of climate-related disasters, economic instability and conflict?

When climate-related disasters, economic instability and violent conflict overlap, their effects mount up, making recovery much more difficult.

For example, a one-off drought might force a smallholder to sell some of their livestock or other assets. But they may be able to rebuild their business once the rains have come. However, if the drought is followed by high price inflation or broader economic volatility and more regular periods of drought, that might worsen the family’s food insecurity, push them into debt and make it harder to rebuild their income and assets.

These compounding forms of vulnerability have severe impacts in countries in sub-Saharan Africa with high poverty levels, weak institutions and limited public resources. Those already in poverty are being pushed deeper. And more people are falling into poverty for the first time and for longer periods of time.

The book also identifies strategies through which some people are escaping poverty. These pathways include relying on environmentally sustainable agricultural practices, diversification into off-farm livelihoods, and continuous economic and social adaptation to changing circumstances.

What about the role of governments and donors?

Our findings point to the fact that efforts and initiatives by governments and donors often reinforce harm, in three ways.

First, in response to crises, governments have adopted austerity measures. Nigeria’s fuel subsidy removal, for example, was accompanied by very little social assistance. This pushed many poor and vulnerable households deep into poverty.

Second, the standard response of fighting one crisis at a time can also make things worse for the world’s poorest. For example, evacuating populations to shelters during floods can increase disease transmission.

Third, there has been a decline in international aid. This will have severe consequences for poverty across future generations.

What are your recommendations?

The book recommends recognising how crises interact rather than addressing them in isolation.

Policies must must understand the challenges faced by poor and vulnerable people, and avoid causing harm.

This may sound obvious. But crisis responses often fail to account for these impacts.

Integrated policy responses could include cash transfers and social protection systems, early warning systems and other forms of disaster preparedness extended to rural and remote communities.

Peacebuilding activities can also help address root causes of both poverty and violent conflict.

Creating inclusive economic opportunities is important. Most people escape extreme poverty through “growth from below”: household-level strategies rather than top-down interventions alone. Yet government strategies seem to be going back to trickle-down economics.

Support from the international community remains important. This requires recommitting to predictable aid flows, especially to the poorest countries. Governments also have to expand their ability to raise and manage their public revenues, for example through taxes.

Complementary approaches, including debt restructuring, are important in the context of tightened aid budgets. They can ease fiscal pressures and help governments maintain pro-poor domestic investments.

What role can NGOs and the private sector play?

Non-state actors can contribute by supporting integrated responses that complement government action. These can include:

strengthening community-level resilience

supporting disaster preparedness at national and local levels

enabling livelihood adaptation

helping address vulnerabilities that emerge from overlapping crises.

Beyond service delivery, civil society organisations help ensure that responses are informed by people’s actual experiences. They can amplify the voices of marginalised groups in decision-making.

NGOs and community-based organisations can also act as intermediaries between communities and governments.

The polycrisis reveals how interconnected vulnerabilities have become today. Policy responses need to equally strive to be more interconnected. Collaboration across government agencies, international organisations and civil society is essential to create pathways out of poverty.

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Nigeria’s Border Closure Failed To Stop Smuggling. Here’s Why

Women wait for the border to reopen at the Benin-Nigeria border city of Krake. Yannick Folly/Getty Images

BY ONYEKACHI E. NNABUIHE

SENIOR LECTURER, DEPARTMENT OF

CRIMINOLOGY, SECURITY, PEACE AND 

CONFLICT NSTUDIES, CALEB UNIVERSITY

Border closures don’t always produce the intended objectives. The idea is usually to control illegal movements and prohibited goods, lessen informal trade, reinforce customs operations, and regain control of national borders. But history shows that in cases as diverse as England, the Asante Kingdom, the US and colonial Nigeria/Benin, stiffer border regulations can instead bring about smuggling and multiply criminal networks.

Where people share ethnic, language and kinship ties across state boundaries, closures disrupt everyday livelihood structures. Where state institutions are weak, corruption disrupts the enforcement processes. The rules become a means of private gain. Closures create artificial scarcity, inflate operational hurdles and drive demand towards underground operators and networks.

Nigeria presents a rich case to explain how border closures work in unstructured, corruption-prone and vulnerable economies.

I’m a peace, conflict, security and development researcher with an interest in border and security politics. In a recently published research article we show that Nigeria’s 2019 border closure did not disrupt or destroy smuggling networks. It reorganised them. The policy increased informal interactions at checkpoints, multiplied illegal routes, and heightened unrestricted power of poorly supervised state agents.

The closure intensified what has been described as “checkpoint politics”. This refers to the exchanges between state officials and non-state actors or border users over who passes and who does not, what moves and what does not, and at what price. It captures how borders actually operate, and challenges the idea that the closure was a success.

The research emphasises the need to reconsider border control approaches by giving closer attention to the local political economy of borderlands.

Nigeria as a border closure case study

Nigeria is a good setting to study the relationship between border closures and smuggling, for six reasons.

One, Nigeria has vast and vulnerable land borders with neighbours, including Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Two, these borderlands feature communities that have strong ethnic and cultural affinities across the countries. Such include the Hausa in Nigeria and Niger as well as the Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin. These affinities sustain networks of informal exchanges despite state restrictions.

Three, unregulated and illicit trade has long been woven into the fabric of Nigeria’s political and economic systems, giving rise to structural black markets and influential industry spaces.

Four, systemic graft among border and security officials has frequently compromised enforcement outcomes while facilitating black markets.

Five, closure policies potentially conflict with regional integration frameworks.

Six, it has actually happened. Nigeria’s 2019 border closure sheds light on the consequences of closure policies for smuggling, inflation, local production, security, state legitimacy and regional relations.

The 2019 border closure

In August 2019, the Nigerian government closed its land borders with neighbouring countries, including Benin Republic, to end rampant smuggling (including small arms).

The policy affected many borderlands, including Seme and Idiroko. These borders are among the busiest trade corridors in west Africa.

Some portrayed the policy as a huge success. They claimed it reduced the influx of foreign goods like rice and poultry products. They also said it protected local farmers and improved national security.

However, underneath this claim lies a more complicated reality, as our research shows.

Our research

Our study drew from interviews, archival material, government documents and newspaper reports. It also drew from academic literature to identify patterns in border practices and policy implementation on the border. The field study lasted between March 2020 and July 2022.

The study shows that the 2019 border closure underestimated “checkpoint politics”. It intensified informal practices like bribery and selective enforcement. Personal and community networks, small scale and fragmented trading, and informal brokerage continued.

Alternative smuggling strategies allowed goods and people to continue crossing the border. People used unofficial crossing points and paths, and transferred goods through multiple intermediaries. Modes and timing of transport shifted and people used social rather than commercial means of mobility.

The World Bank estimated that the closure severely disrupted formal cross-border trade.

The study suggests that traders, smugglers, local residents and state officials collaborated to overcome official border governance structures. Some of the people we interviewed alleged that state officials enabled the passage of contraband goods across checkpoints. Transport operators negotiated payments with border officials in exchange for passage.

Border controls were less about formal rules and more about informal negotiations and financial exchanges.

The Nigeria-Benin frontier is extremely porous. There are hundreds of unofficial routes that are difficult to monitor. Besides, logistical weaknesses, poor infrastructure, inadequate manpower and low salaries among border officials contribute to corruption and weak enforcement.

Reality of border governance

Our findings show that border closure fails when it ignores the daily political and economic dynamics operating in the borders. These dynamics include: negotiated enforcement, rent-seeking and informal payments, cross-border livelihood dependence, and transborder social and kinship networks.

Many policy discussions concentrate on non-state actors as the drivers of illicit cross-border activities. But our research highlights the role of state actors themselves. By implication, the state is not merely a victim of illicit cross-border activities but may be complicit in enabling them.

Particularly, the research draws attention to the economic and social consequences of border closures. Apart from disrupting livelihoods dependent on cross-border trade, it contributed to a rise in food prices and other essentials because local production could not meet domestic demand. Security-oriented border policies can have unintended economic and social effects.

The study highlights the weaknesses of border governance strategies in regions that have long-standing transnational networks, informal trade systems and porous boundaries.

Moving forward

To achieve effectiveness and efficiency, border management should shift from total closures to smart governance that separates illegal smuggling from daily community cross border movement. This calls for intelligence-led enforcement against organised smuggling while expanding legal and accessible channels for small-scale cross-border trade. Regional cooperation and modern border management would help achieve this.

Such an approach would tend to reduce incentives around unofficial routes and the discretionary checkpoint negotiations. This would allow enforcement resources to focus on genuinely illicit activities.

Also, efficient collaboration among border agencies is crucial. This is because fragmented responsibilities among border control agencies could lead to overlapping mandates and weak enforcement systems. It is necessary to improve communication and reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Similarly, stronger regional cooperation between Nigeria and its neighbours in joint border patrols, intelligence sharing, and harmonised trade policies could enhance border governance.

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The Impunity Machine

Human rights groups say the Israeli military’s killing of a Lebanese journalist was a war crime. Israel has faced no consequences.

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International released separate reports about the killing of Amal Khalil by the Israeli military on April 22. Khalil was forty-two and a correspondent for Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper. The two investigations into her death—the groups coordinated their release for impact, alongside a third report, in Arabic, from Legal Agenda, a Lebanese watchdog group—came to essentially the same conclusion: that Israel appears to have committed war crimes when it bombed the vehicle in which Khalil and another journalist, Zainab Faraj, age twenty-one, were traveling, and then destroyed the building where they sought refuge, in the village of al-Tiri, in southern Lebanon. “The Israeli military says it does not target journalists, but the facts and evidence show that it has repeatedly done so. Amal Khalil and Zainab Faraj are the latest victims in a long series of such attacks,” Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher at HRW, said in a statement. “Israeli forces’ continued killing of journalists shows a brazen willingness to commit atrocities without any fear of consequences.”

Here’s what we know about the chain of events that led to Khalil’s death. Khalil and Faraj, a freelance journalist, were trying to verify reports that the Israeli army had withdrawn from al-Tiri, in what would have represented a surprising gain for the Lebanese army. The journalists were following a vehicle that was carrying Ali Nabil Bazzi, a local official, and Mohammed Hourani, Bazzi’s friend and a displaced resident of al-Tiri. At around 2:30pm, an Israeli air strike hit Bazzi and Hourani’s car, killing both men instantly. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the two had been targeted because they were “Hezbollah military operatives,” though HRW found no evidence of martyrdom celebrations typical for fighters after their deaths.

Khalil and Faraj left their vehicle and sought refuge below a nearby structure. Khalil called Moussa Chaalan, a rescuer with the Lebanese Civil Defense, as two Israeli surveillance drones circled overhead. Faraj later recalled that “the drones came extremely close through the roof, less than a meter from my face and Amal’s.” Around an hour later, a second strike hit the journalists’ parked vehicle near where they were sheltering, injuring Khalil. “Glass and debris flew toward us. My ear felt like it burst,” Faraj told Amnesty, adding that Khalil “was bleeding heavily from the nose and head and had shrapnel wounds in her arm and thigh.” The journalists next sought shelter in a three-story building to avoid the heat from their flaming vehicle. At about 4:25pm, a third Israeli air strike hit the building. Chaalan told Amnesty he watched it from his location, two kilometers away. “I saw the air force plane rise and fire. I realized they were the target,” he said. The building collapsed, burying both women under rubble. Chaalan tried to call Khalil again. “No answer,” he said.

While all of this was going on, rescuers were trying to get to Khalil and Faraj. But the Israeli military had recently designated al-Tiri a “forward defense” zone, off limits to civilians, and medics and Civil Defense personnel needed the IDF’s permission to enter. Eventually, shortly after 5pm, the Lebanese Red Cross were authorized to go into the area and extracted Faraj. She was alive but had “a fractured skull, severe injuries to her right leg and eye, and a crushed hand,” Amnesty said. The rescuers then came under attack, as an Israeli quadcopter drone dropped a stun grenade—according to HRW, citing “Lebanon’s Health Ministry, Faraj, and two informed sources”—and, according to witness statements and images of the damage reviewed by HRW, the ambulance was apparently struck with small-arms fire. Shortly before 6pm, the Red Cross was forced to retreat. The Israeli military finally granted the rescuers permission to return at 8:15pm, two sources told HRW, and the Red Cross recovered Khalil’s body around 11pm; an autopsy concluded that she died around 7pm. “Khalil was likely alive when paramedics were forced away,” Kaiss told the Associated Press.

The HRW and Amnesty reports are not the first time Khalil’s killing has been labeled a war crime. Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s prime minister, described it that way at the time. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has also designated Khalil’s death a murder—defined as a targeted killing “in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work”—and recorded a total of sixteen journalists killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon since October of 2023. In June, the Washington Post published a detailed reconstruction that laid out how Khalil likely died as Israel prevented rescuers from reaching her. And yet, nearly four months after Lebanese journalists staged a protest and hundreds of mourners expressed sorrow and outrage at Khalil’s funeral, the Israeli military has faced no consequences. The Amnesty and HRW reports are significant, both because they are the most comprehensive accounts of her killing so far and because they urge an independent investigation and for Lebanon to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes war crimes.

At the time of Khalil’s killing, the Israeli military denied that it targets journalists and said the IDF “works as much as possible to minimize harm that may befall them while maintaining the security of our forces.” On June 12, the Israeli military told Amnesty that it “regrets any harm caused to journalists,” that it “respects freedom of press,” and that it “does not intentionally target them as such.” It added that “the incident underwent a preliminary review, and relevant lessons were implemented accordingly.” It’s unclear what exactly the “lessons” were (and the Israeli military’s use of the phrase “as such” is common, as Jon Allsop wrote in this newsletter last year). But even if we were to take at face value the Israeli military’s claim that Khalil and Faraj were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, Israel would still have violated international law. “The fact that the two journalists were in what Israel has designated a no-return zone does not make them lawful targets. All parties to a conflict have a clear obligation to distinguish between civilians and military targets at all times and to direct their attacks only at military objectives,” Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, wrote in its report. At the very least, the reports concluded, the Israeli military knew—or should have known—from its surveillance drones that the two sheltering journalists were civilians.

Regrets. Denials. Lessons learned. But no accountability. If it feels as if we’ve been here before, it’s because we have. According to CPJ, Israel was responsible “for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2025 and 2024.” Amnesty warned that “persistent impunity for such violations emboldens Israeli forces to continue carrying out unlawful attacks without fear of accountability.” There are, of course, complicating factors. The Lebanese government has not granted the ICC jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute potential war crimes committed in its territory. The Trump administration has, for its part, actively sought to undermine and delegitimize the ICC, which has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and others for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. (Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said last month that the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.”) The US stance has no doubt further emboldened Israel. Moreover, the fourteen-point agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel in late June in an effort to end the fighting states that the countries will “cease all hostile or negative actions in international political or legal forums.” Granting the ICC jurisdiction to investigate Khalil’s death would put Lebanon in violation of the agreement. Plus, there’s the disarray at the ICC, as Joel Simon has written for CJR, which poses practical challenges for prosecution—in spite of the fact that the important role journalists play in war zones has been recognized by international law.

Kaiss, of HRW, told me that Israel’s ability to act with impunity will end only “when there are consequences for these unlawful attacks. When states say, ‘This is not acceptable, we’re suspending arms sales, there’s an arms embargo, no military assistance.’ When an unlawful attack happens and prosecutorial authorities are looking into it, putting military leaders on alert that they’re investigating it as a war crime,” he said. “None of that has happened. And that needs to happen for things to change.” Over the weekend, I also spoke to Alaa Serhal, a freelance journalist in Lebanon, who said he had talked to Khalil the morning she was killed. Her death, he said, has been keenly felt by other members of the press there. Despite journalists’ sticking to strict protocols and safety precautions, they feel targeted, because Israel doesn’t want “the world to see what’s happening,” he told me. The reports classifying Khalil’s killing as an apparent war crime, though, “certainly bring a sense of relief,” Serhal added. “While the path to justice remains long, such classifications offer a glimmer of hope for accountability—especially after previous instances where facts were buried and the perpetrating party was never explicitly named.”

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The World Has Changed. African Countries Must Rethink How They Grow Their Economies

African countries need to invest in reliable electricity because it is the foundation of industrialisation and the digital economy. Zimochen/Pexels

BY JONATHAN MUNEMO

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS,

SALISBURY UNIVERSITY

The prolonged disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how vulnerable Africa’s economies are to geopolitical shocks. Fuel prices have remained elevated, squeezing economies that depend heavily on petroleum imports from the Middle East. These include Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

This vulnerability also puts at risk the continent’s push to escape poverty through what economists call structural transformation: moving workers from low-productivity activities such as subsistence farming into more productive jobs in manufacturing and modern services.

The continent never fully participated in the export-manufacturing wave that transformed East Asia from the 1960s onward. And now Africa’s industrialisation ambitions have become even more difficult to realise as geopolitical rivalry, fragmented supply chains and artificial intelligence reshape the global economy.

As an economist who has written about how weaponisation of global trade affects African economies, I believe structural transformation still matters. But it must be reinvented around four priorities:

larger markets

reliable electricity

Africa’s comparative advantages

agriculture.

Why the old model worked

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Vietnam all industrialised in broadly the same way. They expanded exports of labour-intensive manufactured goods such as garments, footwear, furniture and electronics. These industries created millions of jobs for workers with limited formal education while gradually building technological capabilities, productive firms and efficient logistics networks.

What made this possible was a relatively stable global trading system. Trade barriers generally fell, demand for manufactured goods expanded, and richer countries steadily moved out of low-wage industries as incomes increased. Governments could focus on becoming more competitive because the rules of international trade were comparatively predictable.

Africa never fully benefited from that opportunity. Manufacturing accounts for only about 10% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with around 22% in East Asia and the Pacific. The continent’s share of global manufacturing has fallen from roughly 3% in the 1970s to less than 2% today.

The continent struggled to establish internationally competitive manufacturing even when the global trading environment was relatively open. Among the factors holding it back were:

unreliable electricity

high transport and logistics costs

small and fragmented domestic markets

weak industrial capabilities

limited access to finance

unpredictable policy.

As a result, many economies remained dependent on commodity exports while importing most manufactured goods.

These longstanding constraints have not disappeared. Instead, Africa now faces a double challenge. It must overcome the structural barriers that prevented the traditional manufacturing-led development model from taking off in the past, and also adapt to a global economy that’s changed dramatically. This challenge does not make structural transformation impossible. It simply means the old way of doing it won’t work.

Four changes have rewritten the rules

The first change is that trade itself has become a geopolitical tool. Countries use export controls, financial sanctions and control over strategic technologies to pursue national security goals. The disruption in the Strait of Hormuz illustrates this.

The second is that manufacturing can’t create jobs on the scale it once did. Automation has reduced demand for the low-skill factory jobs that once absorbed millions of workers.

This matters because by 2030 sub-Saharan Africa is expected to account for roughly half of all new entrants to the global labour force. That’s around 15 million young people each year. Creating productive employment will require growth across manufacturing, modern services and higher-value agriculture rather than relying on factories alone.

Third, China has remained competitive in labour-intensive manufacturing. Rising wages led many economists to expect production of clothing, textiles and footwear to relocate to lower-income countries. Instead, China still dominates. This makes it much harder for African producers to enter sectors that earlier industrialisers used as entry points.

The fourth change is artificial intelligence. AI is becoming a general-purpose technology that can help economies move labour and capital into more productive activities. For example:

AI-powered tools can help farmers make better decisions about weather, pests, input use and market prices

businesses can use AI to reduce costs, improve quality and participate in regional and global value chains.

How governments should respond

The African continent still needs millions of better-paying jobs and much higher productivity to reduce poverty and raise living standards. What has changed is the route to achieving those goals.

First, pursue economic security collectively rather than nationally. Structural transformation requires firms to invest in new industries. But they are less likely to do so if export markets are uncertain or supply chains are easily disrupted. A larger integrated market can reduce those risks.

Acting together also gives African countries greater bargaining power as the US, China and Gulf states compete to invest in the continent’s digital and physical infrastructure. Full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area is more urgent than ever.

Second, invest in electricity. It is the foundation of both industrialisation and the digital economy. Manufacturing, digital services and AI-enabled industries cannot grow without reliable power. Yet electricity remains one of the biggest constraints. In sub-Saharan Africa 78% of businesses experience routine power outages. As a result they lose an average 8.4% of annual sales, compared with a global average of 5.2%. In Nigeria 86% of businesses own or share a generator. In Kenya it is 65%; in South Africa 63%.

This dependence on diesel generators increases reliance on imported fuel: a vulnerable spot.

Third, compete where Africa has genuine comparative advantages: industries linked to natural resources and growing domestic markets. Examples include:

processing critical minerals

agro-processing

construction materials

pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Finally, recognise that agriculture is central to structural transformation, not separate from it. Around half of sub-Saharan Africa’s workforce is employed in farming. Higher farm productivity raises rural incomes, releases labour for productive activities and creates demand for manufacturing and services.

AI can accelerate this process by helping farmers.

Countries that successfully connect these new realities to the long-standing goal of shifting workers and resources into higher-productivity activities will be best positioned to achieve sustained and inclusive growth.

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Archaeology Has Evolved: Four Eras Of Understanding Africa’s Past

Benin bronzes collected by the British when they raided and destroyed Benin City in 1897. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

BY TIM FORSSMAN

SENIOR LECTUCRER, UNIVERSITY OF 

MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA

What is the past? It may seem a simple question to answer, but it is more complex than we might think at first. As science, politics, technologies and ways of thinking change, so does our understanding of what went before.

Tim Forssman is an archaeologist who has conducted research in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho and Mozambique. He recently completed a book about how the history of archaeology in Africa has shaped the way we understand the past. Here he shares some thoughts about why the discipline matters.

What are the key phases of archaeological work in Africa?

In my book, I divided the practice of archaeology in Africa into four phases: the early years, the emergence of archaeology, a coming of age, and archaeology’s diaspora across Africa. These are not definitive, and they have fuzzy boundaries, but they made the most sense to me. Each chapter begins with a story that I felt captured that period in time.

The early years came at a time (the late 1800s) when European nations were scrambling to parcel up Africa into colonies. Much of the archaeological work at this time was based on collections, with little analysis of the finds. Most of the research was carried out by museums employees, missionaries, administrators and travellers but little by trained specialists.

In the early 20th century, archaeological approaches changed, leading to a clash of amateurs and professionals. By the 1920s, robust analytical approaches were being developed and used to interpret the past. However, archaeology was still chasing the ghosts of colonial misperceptions of Africa’s history. Bogus notions of an Atlantis, a legendary sunken utopia, in west Africa, or Hamitic people from Egypt bringing advanced technology to large parts of the continent, continued.

The second world war brought about a technological leap. Methods such as radiocarbon dating emerged along with other advanced methods that would fundamentally shift archaeological approaches. Early examples of radiocarbon dating in Africa were from Bernard Fagg’s work in Nigeria on the Jos Plateau. While stationed there as a colonial chief inspector of mines he was alerted to finely crafted terracotta heads. He and his wife, Catherine, searched for more and retrieved a large sample. He dated them, producing an age over 2,000 years old, much older than any known kingdom in west Africa at that time. It challenged colonial views that complex civilisations emerged far later in this part of the world than elsewhere.

Growing from the 1960s, the diaspora of archaeology, was the role communities played in research, either as workers or by offering information and knowledge. This, I argue, represents a complete shift in archaeological frameworks and in giving agency to Africans.

The Swahili coastline is a perfect example. Previous work focused on the role that incoming Arabic groups played in transforming the socio-political landscape. Then a new approach emerged which turned the lens and examined how local communities carved out change along the coastline as part of a much longer history. Interest shifted from monumental settlements like the Great Mosque at Kilwa-Kiswani, in Tanzania, to everyday life.

These chapters show how the lens archaeologists and historians use focuses on different pasts. As our contexts change, as our approaches shift, or as our science takes on new forms, our view of the past comes into a new focus. We see the past through the present – it is dependent on our social, technological, economic and political contexts.

What role does archaeology play in modern Africa?

The past has created the world we inhabit. For example, the entire eastern seaboard, from Mogadishu in Somalia to Vilanculos in Mozambique, is shaped by the long history of trade, interaction, colonisation, slavery and conflict. During the colonial era, and in South Africa until the end of apartheid, much of this was not fully recognised or widely promoted. Refocusing on the past, in places with colonial pasts, can play a reparative role in acknowledging African histories that were poorly recorded, helping us to better understand how our society was shaped.

Archaeology matters beyond how we view ourselves and those around us. It has the potential to promote social harmony, improve spiritual and mental health by connecting people with their past and their ancestors, and create sustainable jobs. It also promotes local and indigenous ways of doing and knowing. In Egypt, the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs through the streets of Cairo, when 22 mummies were moved to their new museum in 2021, became an important symbol of nationhood and identity. However, so much of Africa’s heritage is currently at risk.

Preserving the past is an important task for all archaeologists and historians. Rampant looting for museums and collections has led to the loss of important historical items, such as terracotta statues in Nigeria and Mali. Crime is another concern. Conflict during the late 1990s in Eritrea and Ethiopia resulted in the toppling of stelae (stone columns) and golden finds from Thulamela (a site in South Africa’s Kruger National Park) were stolen from the museum in Skukuza, never to be retrieved.

Climate change is having an irreparable impact on history and heritage. In east Africa, potentially more than a quarter of the Unesco World Heritage sites are at risk of flooding or erosion. Mozambique is already witnessing massive damage from cyclones. It is only through archaeology that we learn more of these important pasts and identify methods to protect and preserve them.

Where do you see the field going next?

It is a very diverse discipline with a lot of sub-fields. Each has their own ambitions, aims and goals. But I believe there are some overarching agendas.

Reviewing scientific papers of African research shows that the vast majority are authored by people from Europe and North America. This brings collaborations, funds and training opportunities, but it also causes problems locally. This power dynamic needs to be revised. There should be more of an emphasis on growing local capacity, facilities and training.

Archaeological science is advancing our knowledge of the past at a rapid rate. Genetic research is helping us understand human and animal movements across the continent, and chemical analysis of artefacts such as glass beads is helping us map trade networks. We need more laboratories in Africa. This will create jobs and skills development, and reduce the risks associated with moving sensitive heritage items far from their places of origin.

I also feel that including local communities in archaeological research at various levels is a grand shift in the discipline. In the earlier years, community knowledge was undervalued, whereas today many studies place it at the centre of understanding. Studies of rock art, for example, struggled to understand the art’s meaning until scholars turned to the belief systems of people who produced it to unlock its symbolism.

While there are many challenges, archaeology is in a strong position to contribute to the future. However, archaeologists must ensure that they show how the past is relevant in the present, or it risks being left behind.

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War, Erasure, And The Politics Of Culture In Sudan

BY LARISSA-DIANA FUHRMANN

This article examines contemporary cultural erasure in Sudan. It highlights resilient Sudanese efforts and international collaboration, positioning cultural heritage as essential infrastructure for truth-telling, reparations, and inclusive post-war nation-building. It advocates for urgent policy integration to counter polarization and historical revisionism for a plural future.

Two millennia of inhabitation by indigenous groups, immigrant and diaspora communities, and many others who made the land their home have shaped Sudan’s cultural legacy along the two Niles. Today, over 120 languages connect Sudan’s territories and diasporas, exemplifying the country’s immense diversity as the result of its complex history. However, contemporary legislation, such as the “Strange Faces Law,” questions who is truly Sudanese, leading to the arrests of people suspected of being from Darfur or Kordofan based on their facial features and skin tone. As such laws polarize the country and the Sudanese Civil War ravages it, Sudan must act against them to preserve national unity.

In April 2023, the war in Sudan erupted in the capital, Khartoum, between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by General Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa (Hemedti), and the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Former President Omer Al Bashir integrated the RSF into the SAF in 2018, but the RSF retained operational autonomy, funded by gold mines under its control. The RSF itself evolved from the militia Janjaweed, infamous for atrocities committed in Darfur since the 1990s. The escalation of the rivalry between al-Burhan and Hemedti has led to the current violent conflict. Thus far, combatants have deliberately targeted health and education systems, and essential services have collapsed.

The conflict ranks among this century’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and yet, international intervention remains limited, forcing Sudanese-led initiatives, such as the Emergency Response Rooms and Community Kitchens, to carry the burden of humanitarian response with minimal resources and a heavy reliance on volunteer work and donations from the diaspora. The limited array of international responses focuses on immediate needs such as medical care, shelter, food, water, sanitation, and education. As a result, the significant and often irreversible damage to Sudan’s cultural heritage and artistic community receives less attention and support. This overlooked destruction and subsequent inaction, however, fuel cycles of violence and erode community cohesion, positioning policies that safeguard Sudan’s cultural heritage on a broader scale as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery.

Mapping the Damage: Tangible and Intangible Losses

Destruction and theft of cultural heritage have a long history as deliberate strategies to exert power in Sudan. Such policies of erasure and marginalization trace back to colonial-era policies where Khartoum, as a central hub of administration, utilized them to oppress and ostracize Darfuri, South Sudanese, and other peripheral histories.

Today, the RSF targets archives, libraries, and museums as tools to control memory and legitimize their dominance, often under the pretense of revenge against the Khartoum elites who have long sidelined the rest of Sudan. UNESCO’s risk and damage assessment and Sudanese-led initiatives confirm that out of 139 at-risk heritage sites—museums, world heritage sites, archeological sites, and important private collections—ten museums and cultural centers have been looted, stolen from, and vandalized in the past 1,000 days. However, due to present-day access constraints, especially in areas where active fighting continues, significant data gaps create an incomplete picture of damage. Satellite imagery, crowdsourced reports, and diaspora efforts are beginning to fill these information gaps, suggesting the true scale of damage far exceeds current estimates.

For example, RSF forces looted the National Museum in Khartoum in June 2023. A video circulating on social media shows fighters entering the bioarcheology lab of the museum, opening storage containers with mummies, and claiming the mummies were victims of the dictatorship of al-Bashir. The director of the National Museum, Dr. Ghalia Jar Al-Nabi, reacted to the viral clip, stating that she is “worried about where else they might have gone in the museum that no one filmed, and what else they are going to do.” Director Ikhlas Abdellatif of the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) accused RSF forces of smuggling artifacts to Chad and South Sudan for sale to art dealers and private collectors. Some artifacts have resurfaced on platforms such as eBay.

Additionally, the destruction of institutions such as the National Recording Office in Khartoum, which held unique documentation dating back to the mid-19th century, has resulted in the loss of vast amounts of data. Erasure of records prevents the uncovering of continuities of violence perpetrated by colonial powers, past abuses of power by Sudanese governments, corruption, or even legal precedents, effectively erasing the historical basis for current legal and social rights.

Sudanese cultural heritage faces threats not only through active displacement and destruction, but also through targeted violence against artists, musicians, poets, archivists, and other cultural workers. The yearly parade in Omdurman on the day of the Prophet’s birthday exemplifies events that have not been celebrated since the outbreak of the war. Smaller religious and linguistic communities in places including the Nuba Mountains and Darfur risk outright extinction amid mass displacement and death, with over 50 Sudanese languages at risk. Unlike traceable artifacts, these losses erode irreplaceable networks, transmission chains, and social spaces. Policy must therefore target both material safeguards and living practices to rebuild and restore cultural infrastructure.

Sudanese-Led Preservation Efforts

Several initiatives demonstrate that targeted local engagement and international collaboration can effectively combat cultural erasure in Sudan. They provide policy models that should be better supported by international donors.

Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH) is an initiative funded by the British Council and run by Sudanese archivists and cultural workers who conduct research, create maps, and curate exhibitions. They collaborate with vulnerable communities in Sudan and in exile to document their culture and help build resilience. The SSLH is one of the only groups currently dedicating its efforts to safeguarding intangible heritage on a global scale. Similarly, Blue Shield Sudan, established in December 2024, constitutes the first nationally coordinated cultural protection body founded during the Sudanese conflict. Led by Professor Intisar El-Zein Soghayroun, it connects various initiatives in Sudan that defend cultural identity.

In a more decentralized way, neighborhood committees, women’s groups, and youth groups have recorded stories from community members. Local radio stations, podcasts, and social media channels run by Sudanese creators have served as the vessels of this preservation, broadcasting oral histories and music as acts of resistance. Examples include private initiatives that contribute to the archiving of knowledge and raising of global awareness, such as Omer Al Tijani’s “Sudanese Kitchen” cookbook and Hana Baba’s “Folktales from Sudan” podcast.

Individually, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and performers document and preserve wartime life, atrocities, flight routes, and stories, as well as life in exile. Artists have employed street art and graffiti, as well as digital art, to commemorate massacres and disappeared persons in Sudan. These initiatives have revealed the potential and power of Sudanese art to connect the diverse population and overcome the ongoing crisis. They ultimately contribute to fostering community and preserving cohesion in a country increasingly torn apart by war.

These efforts, from nationally coordinated heritage protection such as the SSLH to grassroots storytelling, such as the podcast and book project, illustrate a diverse and community-driven movement resisting Sudan’s cultural destruction. They show how creative resilience and civic solidarity can preserve plural identities during active conflict and with minimal resources. Building on these examples, it becomes clear that integrating cultural preservation efforts into policy frameworks is not only valuable and possible but also necessary.

Importantly, Sudan acceded to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and has recently joined the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Second Protocol on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. These actions strengthen Sudan’s legal and institutional framework for protecting cultural property and create a base for international collaboration to counter illicit trafficking. As such, they enable a greater cooperative breadth within which cultural preservation initiatives can be coordinated and integrated, and ultimately constitute the legal foundation of any future policy.

Why Prioritize Culture: Rationales for Policy Integration

The widespread destruction and displacement in Sudan have created a critical threat to tangible and intangible heritage. While much has been destroyed, scaling Sudanese-led efforts, such as Sudan Memory and SSLH, will support long-term holistic recovery. International donors, UN agencies, and regional bodies should integrate cultural safeguarding into their humanitarian and reconstruction frameworks. These actions should become a core element of post-conflict resilience.

Effective steps could include deploying cultural emergency response teams. Composed of expert units for on-site urgent recovery, stabilization, or excavation of artifacts or sites, such teams would support the data-mapping of endangered sites. Their deployment with coordination clusters, humanitarian working groups like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, local NGOs, or civilian initiatives networks, would cement preservation as a key function of operations.

As the effectiveness of deployments would face the constraints of distance and active conflict, funding for “low-tech, low-visibility” tools like digitization kits, secure cloud storage, and training and micro-grants for community archiving could supplement the capacity for preservation in empowering existing local networks to scale their proven practices. Cultural workers and artists should be recognized as critical civilian responders. Offering training programs in artifact restoration techniques, documentation, and conservation would help build durable skills that remain within Sudan, irrespective of international partners’ willingness to invest in broader initiatives. Donors such as UNESCO and national authorities like the NCAM can facilitate partnerships with museums, universities, and digital preservation institutions to provide knowledge exchange and emergency technical support.

Finally, a coalition of international and domestic actors should implement fast-tracked emergency protection measures to prevent further looting. Temporary relocation, digital “mirroring” (rapid 3D digital replicas of artifacts produced for safe virtual access), or “cultural protection corridors” (secure pathways like humanitarian corridors linking sites for monitored movement) for endangered materials and personnel would reduce the prevalence of trafficking. Such measures should, however, be tempered by binding return and ownership guarantees to avoid their exploitation. Supporting monitoring initiatives between cultural institutions and international observers of these processes could further coordinate disparate initiatives.

Conclusion

Lasting culture counters the serious threats enabled by targeted cultural destruction, including historical revisionism, polarization, and weakened social cohesion. Examples such as Afghanistan and Iraq show how heritage demolitions and bans on cultural or religious practice serve to erase collective memory and undermine diverse identities. Conversely, in Sudan, shared narratives, mourning rituals, and cross-community dialogues via cultural practices soften polarization, trauma, and cycles of revenge, forming a foundation for reconciliation and transitional justice after prolonged conflict.

Today, warring factions in Sudan use cultural erasure to silence resistance and diverse voices. Funding preservation now will determine who gets remembered, whose suffering remains legible, and which futures seem viable. Preserving Sudan’s cultural artifacts and traditions amid war does not merely serve a nostalgic purpose. It ensures any political settlement rests on plural memory, rather than silence, amnesia, or erasure.

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The Moral Paradox Of Extreme Wealth: Why People Oppose It Yet Are Reluctant To Take Steps To Reduce It

Extreme wealth can concentrate power in the hands of a few. Flavio Coelho/Getty Images

BY JEN COLE WRIGHT

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY,

COLLEGE OF CHARLSTON

In 2026 – up until July – Elon Musk’s estimated wealth was growing by somewhere between US$30 million and $100 million an hour, making him, at least briefly, the worlds’ first trillionaire. By comparison, the typical American worker earns between $23 and $56 an hour.

While Musk’s wealth, even in the face of recent losses, is extreme, dramatic disparities have become commonplace. As of 2026, America had nearly 1,000 billionaires, whereas, according to the most recent federal data available, in 2024 roughly 10.6% of the population – or 35.9 million people – lived below the poverty line. The poverty line is the minimum level of income a person or family needs to be able to cover basic living needs, such as food, clothing and shelter.

Given the prevalence of such stark inequality, it would be easy to assume that most people accept it as fair – but they don’t. As a psychologist who studies how people navigate moral problems, I suspect that one major challenge to effectively reining in extreme wealth is that doing so forces people to navigate between opposing moral demands.

The disconnect

In 2014, researchers used survey data from more than 55,000 people across 40 countries, asking what top executives and unskilled workers earn, and what they should earn. In the U.S. the average respondent – across income levels, education and political divides – said the ideal pay ratio would be about 7-to-1. At the time it was closer to 350-to-1, meaning that on average a CEO earned 350 times more.

In other words, Americans reported that the ideal was something far more equal. Yet they have generally been unlikely to support high taxation on wealth, redistribution or limits on wealth accumulation – though recent poll data suggests this may be changing.

Scholars have offered different explanations for this disconnect between what people say they want and what they are willing to do about it.

Some argue that people chronically underestimate the scale of inequality – in the 2014 study, Americans underestimated the actual pay ratio at the time as being only 30-to-1. Others argue that the primary driver of the disconnect is people’s unwillingness to abandon their beliefs in merit – that wealth is the product of hard work, talent and risk.

Some also point to the fact that people can feel compelled to defend systems as essentially good, even when those systems produce harmful outcomes – a phenomenon known as “system justification.” This is in part because of the psychological need to believe in a just world, where good people are rewarded and bad people are punished.

My own research on how people navigate competing moral demands suggests that one potential explanation lies in a critical tension that is generated by morality itself.

Morality’s balancing act

Morality is always balancing between two things that pull against each other.

On one side, morality is supposed to protect people from harm. When a community comes to see something as unreasonably harmful – drunken driving, child labor, smoking indoors – it moves collectively to prevent that harm, typically by regulating or forbidding the behavior and punishing those who do it.

On the other side, morality is supposed to protect people’s personal autonomy and freedom, even when others in their community dislike or disagree with their choices. People have a moral right to make certain decisions for themselves, whether that is choosing a flavor of ice cream or deciding whether to have children.

On any contested issue, these moral demands pull in opposite directions. People must collectively decide whether the harm caused by an action justifies limiting individual freedom – for example, making it illegal to drive a car while impaired by alcohol. At other times, restricting choice might itself do greater harm, such as banning controversial books, rather than leaving people to choose what to read for themselves.

Consider libertarian morality, which leans heavily in the direction of protecting the space of freedom and individual rights. Libertarians defend their right to free choice with the same conviction other groups bring to preventing harm by restricting those choices. Both are responding to the same moral tension, but they resolve it in different ways.

For example, libertarians generally argue that owning guns, using illicit drugs and refusing vaccinations are individual rights that must be protected from the harm of infringement via regulation. There are others, however, who disagree – arguing that the harms caused by gun deaths, drug abuse and overdose, and the spread of preventable disease require regulation that constrains or prohibits completely people’s freedom to choose.

At their core, these are disputes about where the line falls between a harm serious enough to warrant control and a freedom too important to override.

Navigating the balance

And this is where the issue of extreme wealth is located – sitting precisely on this moral fault line.

On one side, there is a moral claim that arguably lies at the heart of the “American Dream”: People have the right to keep and enjoy what their own efforts, talent and willingness to take risks produces. They also have a right to make their own way in the world, without undue interference, based on their own abilities to do so. They should be free to decide what to do with the wealth they have earned, including leaving it to current and future family members after death.

On the other side, there are serious moral harms to be prevented. Past a certain point, wealth stops being only money and becomes a detrimental form of power over others: People like Elon Musk have the capacity to shape markets such as the SpaceX IPO, influence politics by donating hundreds of millions to campaigns, and control major platforms where public debate happens, such as Twitter, now X.

The gap that extreme wealth creates does not just mean some people have far more; it means a minority have the power to ensure that the majority has far less. And this is a significant harm that cannot go unaddressed.

While it is helpful to recognize the problem of extreme wealth as a potential imbalance between two equally important moral demands, that by itself does not tell us what the correct balance is or how to achieve it.

This dilemma is made more difficult by the fact that we experience and respond to certain kinds of moral threats more strongly than others. For example, imagining losing what belongs to you, what you have earned, is what researchers call “affectively immediate”: It triggers strong negative emotions and a powerful sense of moral injustice. In turn, the experience of moral injustice heightens people’s perception of risk, making it feel more serious. This combination captures people’s moral attention and spurs them to action.

The harms of unfettered wealth accumulation, on the other hand, are difficult to experience in the same emotionally potent way. Just like people can directly experience the negative consequences of specific extreme weather events, but not of climate change, the dangers of extreme wealth itself cannot be directly experienced, though some of its consequences can be.

And while researchers have found that thinking about abstract moral harms such as climate change and extreme wealth can activate people’s moral principles and orient them toward the larger social good, this by itself is typically not enough to motivate sustained action, especially when pitted against the sheer magnitude of the problem, which dampens our capacity to respond emotionally.

The challenge, then, is not to feel less protective of what people earn and their right to earn it. Rather, it is to actively promote public discussion that is grounded in an accurate understanding of how extreme wealth, while benefiting a few, can substantively harm everyone else.

If people can keep in mind that, despite our differences, we generally want a more equal society, then I believe perhaps it will be possible to strike a moral balance that better protects all of us from harm.

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