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

BY HANNAH NRAE ARMSTRONG AND JOHN MCINTIRE

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

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

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

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

HIDDEN FIGURES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A DEBT BOMB DETONATES

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

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

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

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

WIN-WIN SOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY PAUL QUIGLEY

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

VIRGINIA TECH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY KERSTIN BREE CARLSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR INTERNATIONAL

LAW, ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2002, the DRC resubmitted claims against Rwanda.

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

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

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

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

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

The DRC has invoked this history in its submission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Wikimedia Commons

BY MARTIN BENSON STROHMAYDER

RESEARCH FELLOW AND SUDANS RESEARCH

DIRECTOR, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a pattern I call predatory peace.

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

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

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

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

Peace as ‘organised robbery’ in South Sudan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State budgets perform reform while the money moves elsewhere.

What people get in return

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

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

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

What non-predatory peace would require

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

rebuilding of a transparent, civilian-controlled revenue complex


linking what people pay to what they receive


making external support conditional on genuine revenue reform.


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

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

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

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From Augustine To Jefferson, The Idea Of separating Church And State Has Deep Religious And Secular Roots

The founding generation: James Madison, left, and Thomas Jefferson, both proponents of the separation of church and state. Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

BY STEPHEN K. GREEN

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR RELIGION,

LAW & DEMOCRACY, WILLAMETTE

UNIVERSITY

The Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission released its report on June 26, 2026, on the state of religious freedom in the United States, declaring it to be under attack.

The commission was established in May 2025 to identify and report on “emerging threats to religious liberty, uphold Federal laws that protect all citizens’ full participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protect the free exercise of religion.” Despite those altruistic goals, from the beginning, the commission faced criticism that the composition and agenda of the body were slanted toward a conservative Christian perspective.

The commission conducted seven hearings over the course of a year, taking testimony from approximately 100 witnesses.

The draft report recounts numerous incidents of reputed bias and mistreatment of people based on their religious faith, and it places the blame on bureaucrats who exhibit a disdain for demonstrations of religious conviction. The report attributes much of this to the use of “the metaphor ‘wall of separation of church and state’ to justify excluding religious Americans from equal participation in the public square.”

As author of the book “Separating Church and State: A History,” I argue that the commission’s broadside on the concept of separation of church and state is misplaced, but not new. Critics have portrayed the idea as anti-religious and ahistorical ever since the Supreme Court embraced it in 1947.

Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’

In the 1947 landmark case of Everson vs. Board of Education, involving public financial aid for religious education, the justices announced that they would use the concept of church-state separation as a guide for interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Those clauses state “that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In that same decision, the justices also employed the metaphor of “a wall of separation between church and state,” a phrase borrowed from an 1802 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to an association of Baptist churches in Connecticut. At the time, the Baptists were a minority in a state that still maintained a religious establishment. Jefferson sympathized with their plight, employing the wall of separation metaphor to emphasize that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God” and not to “the legislative powers of government.”

Tradition of separation

The idea of separate spheres of spiritual and secular functions and authority was advanced by religious and secular thinkers to benefit both religion and the state.

In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities, one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the purity of the church.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.

Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”

The metaphor of a ‘wall of separation’

At the same time, religious reformers were employing concepts of walls, hedges or other barriers to ensure that the secular and religious realms remained apart.

Protestant Anabaptists – Mennonites, Hutterites, Brethren – took the theological idea of separationism to heart, seeking to keep their communities apart from what they saw as the corruptions of the fallen world. They were declining to swear oaths of allegiance to civil authorities or otherwise participate in civic functions.

The early leader of the Mennonites, Menno Simons, used the term a “separating wall” to illustrate the degree of separateness their faith required from civil authority.

Finally, Roger Williams, the Puritan-turned-Baptist founder of Rhode Island, advocated for complete religious liberty. He called for maintaining a “hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

Enlightenment figures, such as John Locke, also advanced notions of separation of church and state. In 1689, Locke wrote that the church must be “absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable.”

Influential British writer James Burgh called for building “an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil … the less the church and state had to do with one another, it would be better for both.” Scholars believe that this was likely one source for Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Connecticut Baptists where he used the same metaphor.

A familiar concept

Thus, members of the America’s founding generation were familiar with the concept of distinct spheres of authority between religion and government and the necessity of keeping those functions separate.

Even though Jefferson used the wall metaphor only once, he worked assiduously throughout his life to advance religious freedom via church-state separation. James Madison employed similar imagery, such as calling for “a great barrier” between the two.

Church-state separation wasn’t just an imagery idea; it was a concept that many people embraced. As Madison wrote, “religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

As a result, to this day, many denominations and religiously affiliated groups, such as many Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and members of Reform Judaism, among others, support the separation of church and state as essential for maintaining religious freedom.

And church-state separation continues to receive popular support. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2026, 54% of Americans say the government should enforce church-state separation – a consistent percentage – whereas only 13% believe it should stop enforcing it, down from 19% in 2021.

Narrow view

Despite this pedigree, the Religious Liberty Commission’s report expresses particular disdain for the “wall” metaphor, stating that “the ‘wall of separation’ phrase does not appear in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution.” The report calls it a “belabored metaphor” that “can wrongly imply that church and state are opposed to one another and must remain completely separate.”

The report also takes a narrow view of what is prohibited by the religion clauses: “that the government may not officially prefer one religion over another, take over the functions of a church, or coerce religious observance,” which would otherwise allow for other types of church-state intermixing such as government funding of religious education.

In her final opinion as a Supreme Court justice in 2005, Sandra Day O’Connor – a judicial conservative – reflected on the importance of church-state separation to guarantee full religious freedom.

“The First Amendment expresses our Nation’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions – one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion.”

She concluded with a challenge: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

That the commission’s report ignores the benefit of church-state separation to American society is troubling.

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How Did It Feel To Be An American Colonist In 1776? Probably Itchy, Achy And Slightly Nauseated

Life went on in the late 18th century, regardless of your everyday ailments. Archive Photos/Getty Images

BY KATHERINE OTT

CURATOR OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE,

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN

HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Trade the tricorn hats, bonnets and homespun shirts for flip flops, sneakers and soccer jerseys, and the intrepid revolutionaries of 1776 would have looked a lot like the people of 2026. But their sense of embodiment and experience of health was markedly different from Americans today.

It goes deeper than not having aspirin, toothpaste or air conditioning, or not knowing about germs and penicillin. What was happening in their gut and mouth and on their skin was a world away from today. Chronic bodily states of indigestion, itchy skin, flatulence and slow-healing wounds were common and accommodated.

The American colonists were friends with affliction and shared their suffering socially, in writing and conversation. Ben Franklin, no stranger to suffering, wrote that “We are first mov’d by Pain, and the whole succeeding Course of our Lives is but one continu’d Series of Action with a view to be freed from it.”

Acute illnesses like smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, yellow fever and diptheria shadowed every ache and cough. But the everyday diminishment of vitality, mobility and equanimity defined life in 1776. Illness was pervasive. Rich or poor, free or enslaved, everyone was at risk.

Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with bodies and what it felt like to be in someone else’s skin. Now that I am a medical historian, I am lucky to be a Smithsonian curator with access to a large collection of medical instruments that figuratively put some flesh on the descriptions in old letters and medical journals about rheum, dyspepsia and other then-common conditions.

Although embodied experience varied in different localities around the Atlantic Basin by climate, legal status, race and other vulnerabilities, the instruments used on those bodies capture general notions of physical well-being. A lot is missing from our connection to people in the past when all we use are words.

Human bodies were like animals’

The few medical instruments of the revolutionary era were heavy in the hand, awkward in use and imprecise to maneuver. They also tell a story of tolerance for pain and discomfort that is both disquieting and fascinating.

The design and materials of devices such as bone saws, fleams and scarifacators – used to bleed veins and skin surfaces – illustrate the close affinity of humans with other animals. The same scalpel or bone saw that cut a human also cleft sheep, horses, pigs and other animals in distress.

The veil between species was thin. In 1776, people lived closely with their animals. They brought them into the house in bad weather or spent nights on straw in the shed with them – exclusive of genteel families, that is.

Cleanliness often took the form of river bathing, intended to invigorate rather than for sanitary purposes. In place of bathing, people changed clothes. The result was a menu of skin complaints – fungal, bacterial and otherwise.

Lice abounded. Bed bugs interrupted sleep. Scabies, ringworm, rashes from numerous unknown sources and unwashed skin was wrapped in clothing of stiff linen, smelly woolens or coarse calico. The byproduct was irritated, itchy skin with the discomfort of scratches, scabs and the stink that accompanied it.

Because infancy was risky, some colonial families and midwives followed tough love and tried to “harden” the child with cold water immersion and weaning. Many Indigenous women, on the other hand, nursed their infants until they were three or four years old. One in three colonist babies did not live to their second birthday.

Tools to purge ill humors

If a person did survive to adulthood, there was a good chance they would live to 55 or 60, barring accidents or childbirth complications.

There were few professional doctors, so healthcare came from midwives, bonesetters who also cut hair and removed cataracts, ministers, and community members, including apothecaries and plantation root doctors who were knowledgeable about plants. Although Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had been established as the first American hospital 25 years earlier, institutions for care were few at the time of the revolution.

European colonists commonly believed that the balance of humors – yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm – circulating through one’s body was important for health. Belief in the efficacy of bloodletting was well-established and undisputed until well into the 1800s.

Doctors, following accepted practice, would likely have bled or purged an ill person for humoral balance. Surgeons washed their bloody hands in contaminated water and dried them on their equally bloody apron or clothes, unaware of germs.

When fluid accumulated from infection, a practitioner might use a small sharp spear nested in a metal tube, called a trocar and cannula. The pair were pushed into the body wherever swelling threatened a patient’s health, or exploration of an inner cavity was warranted. Then the doctor removed the perforating trocar, with its triangular shaped head, and left the cannula in place, as a conduit for fluids going in or coming out.

Desperate patients drank liquor to escape the procedure in this pre-anaesthesia era. Community care by family, friends and experienced elders was often more effective and safer than a trained physician.

A mouthful of troubles

Low-level scurvy, caused by lack of vitamin C, was common, thanks to diets containing few vegetables and fruits. Mild scurvy caused bleeding gums, tooth loss and foul-smelling breath.

Home manuals offering advice for health, domestic activities and marriage included many recipes for mouth wash. Ingredients often included tobacco ash, alum, sage, clove and sometimes charcoal. Charcoal also doubled for polishing teeth.

To pull a cracked or decayed tooth, a practitioner might yank it with the claw of a tooth key, painful but quicker than slippery fingers or forceps.

Without a reliable way to keep food fresh, many meals included sour milk and meat that was beginning to rot – what colonists called “high.” Spoiled food meant dyspepsia – otherwise known as indigestion – and loose bowels.

People commonly used tobacco to treat many ailments, including indigestion, respiratory problems, pain and loathsome mouth afflictions. They also turned to laudanum, from opium, as well as the poisons mercury and antimony.

A life of daily discomfort

Retrospective diagnosis is always flawed but the Revolutionary generation experienced ailments that sound similar to diabetes, arthritis, cancer, anemia, rabies, the common cold and tuberculosis. There were no effective treatments or consistent diagnosis for any of these.

Some explanations of bodily difference were obviously wrong, such as physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush’s conviction that the dark skin of African Americans was a disease, derived from leprosy. Common wisdom also held that birthmarks were caused by the mother’s experience during pregnancy.

Bodily experiences that made sense in 1776 are often inscrutable to people today. Feelings are fleeting and words inadequate. Without considering objects, understanding history is incomplete, leaving people today disconnected from those who lived it.

We can’t directly know each colonist’s individual self. But knowing their material world through medical objects of their time allows us to visit and appreciate how they managed to cut through distractions of the body and bequeath to us those groundbreaking, enduring self-evident truths.

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As The US Turns 250, A Forgotten Founding Influence Helps Explain Its Current Unease

This painting depicts the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers leaned on French philosopher Montesquieu as they designed the Constitution. GraphicaArtis/Archive Photos via Getty

BY ROBERT A. BALLINGALL

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL

SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, many people in the U.S. are deeply concerned about the country’s future.

A recent poll by Elon University found that 69% of respondents “believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would feel more disappointment than pride about modern American democracy.” Confidence in public institutions is historically low, and the most recent Harvard Youth Poll indicates that just a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel hopeful about the future of America.”

Many are also afraid. For the 10th consecutive year, Americans reported corrupt government officials to be their single greatest fear, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, ranking above financial collapse or a loved one becoming seriously ill.

“Americans have come to see threats as not just the possibility of attack by a foreign adversary. The potential for political violence at home is part of it, along with polarization, corruption and a sense of cultural dysfunction,” pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in The New York Times. “Americans increasingly view the survival of the country as being at stake.”

How are people in the U.S. to make sense of these trends? As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, how faithful is the U.S. today to its founding principles? I’m a political philosophy scholar who studies constitutional government. In my view, an especially helpful approach to answering such questions is to revisit the towering but neglected influence of the French philosopher Montesquieu on the founding of this country.
Montesquieu and the American founding

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was an 18th-century philosopher and aristocrat whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” caused a sensation when published in 1748. His ideas shaped the American founders. At the Constitutional Convention, only the Bible was quoted more often.

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

Montesquieu was especially celebrated for his account of how and why political power needs to be separated into branches. But behind this now familiar idea was another that is less remembered: Montesquieu’s theory of liberty inspired the founders’ own understandings of this core concept of American politics.
A theory of liberty

In “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu describes political liberty as a “tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.” To be free is to believe that one is secure. But to believe as much, “it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.”

Liberty cannot be a matter of “doing what one wants,” Montesquieu warns. What if what one person wants threatens others? Then one person’s freedom to act limits everyone else’s. No one can feel secure unless everyone lives under laws that regulate what each may do. Montesquieu understood liberty in terms of this confidence or “tranquility” because it amounts to being free from the arbitrary will of others.

When Montesquieu stresses freedom from fear of other citizens, he doesn’t just mean private individuals. He especially means those acting in a public capacity, like “magistrates” or “rulers.” If public officials’ behavior doesn’t conform to predictable norms set by law, if agents of the government can summarily arrest people, seize their property or revoke their citizenship – say, by denaturalizing and deporting them without due process – it becomes impossible to feel secure.

Even if such actions aren’t directed against me or those like me, such lawlessness is still threatening because it’s unpredictable. I might support the government’s moves against other groups in the moment, but what’s to stop the government from suddenly turning on me when the political winds change?

To prevent public officials from simply doing what they want, Montesquieu famously called for the separation of political power into branches headed by different citizens.

But, he explains, it is not enough that people live under free institutions. They must also believe those institutions to be in the service of their freedom. Liberty, then, is as much a matter of opinion as of fact.
The tyranny of opinion

Montesquieu shows in “The Spirit of the Laws” how the fundamental laws of a country can permit a free way of life even as the country’s cultural norms prevent it. A country might have a free constitution while its citizens believe they hold moral obligations inconsistent with it.

For example, today, Americans might believe that the demands of racial equity or of evangelical Christianity are so pressing that executive power would be justified in ignoring the legislature or the judiciary to serve them.

“In these instances,” Montesquieu writes, “the Constitution will be free by right and not in fact.” The people – or some of them – will experience the law as a hindrance to what they believe they ought or ought not to do.

In such cases, there arises what Montesquieu calls a tyranny “of opinion.” The laws that would otherwise free people from fear of one another and of the government instead inspire a fear all their own. The laws might prevent what some people believe is morally right, or command – in the name of protecting others’ rights or the common good – what others regard as unjust or unholy.

That misalignment between constitutional law and cultural norms makes people feel insecure. It makes the Constitution seem opposed to their will and sense of duty. It can then seem appealing for a leader to promise, in the name of freedom, to ignore the law.
A bracing reminder

In recent years, figures across the political spectrum have called for radical constitutional change – or for ignoring the Constitution outright. There are calls not only to pack the Supreme Court or to ignore its decisions, but also to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College.

From Montesquieu’s perspective, polarization worsens this appetite for disregarding constitutional norms. Each party champions a cultural agenda from which supporters of the other party recoil. Whenever either party is in office, even when it respects constitutional law, its rule can feel to the other side much like the tyranny of opinion Montesquieu describes. The other side’s policies can seem to violate deeply held values, whether it’s banning transgender girls from competing in girls sports or declining to deport immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally.

According to Montesquieu, liberty depends on the kind of civic culture the U.S. seems at risk of losing. No institutions, however well designed, can preserve liberty if citizens believe their preferred cultural norms are so obligatory that political power is needed to enforce them, opposition be damned.

A culture more tolerant of moral disagreements and less quick to reach for political power to force others to accept what they find morally wrong would help ease the distrust many Americans feel toward the government and one another. Until then, Americans will continue drifting away from the liberty that the U.S. was founded to secure.

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Conspiracy Theories That Emerged From A Civil Rights Shooting 60 Years Ago Resonate Today

James Meredith looks at Aubrey Norvell, partially hidden behind foliage, after Norvell shot him in Hernando, Miss., on June 6, 1966. AP Photo/Jack Thornell

BY ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN

BIZAT FAMILY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS

On June 6, 1966, on a stretch of Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, a portly, middle-aged white man named Aubrey Norvell stepped out of a gully, lifted his shotgun and fired three shots at James Meredith, a Black civil rights activist and Air Force veteran.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi four years earlier, Meredith was on the second day of a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, with the aims of registering voters and defying white intimidation.

Bloodied by bird shot, Meredith again returned to the national spotlight. The shooting transformed his walk into a civil rights spectacle.

Activists descended upon Mississippi for a three-week mass march. It featured titans of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., while inspiring Mississippians to march down country roads, volunteer their homes and food, and register at their local courthouses. During these protests, the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael introduced “Black Power,” a slogan of self-determination that marked the next stage in the Black freedom struggle.

It is a rich, intricate and evocative story – one that I tried to chronicle in my book, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”

Sixty years later, however, a mystery lingers. Clouded in the haze of a political extravaganza, Norvell never revealed his motivations for shooting Meredith.

His silence allowed for the flourishing of conspiracy theories – most notably, from those most resistant to racial equality. In a political and rhetorical strategy that echoes into the present day, many white conservative Southerners painted themselves as Norvell’s real victims.

‘A quiet, Christian man’

At first, it was civil rights activists who suspected a conspiracy. Meredith’s companions testified that law enforcement had reacted slowly to Norvell’s threat. They assumed that Norvell was a virulent white supremacist, in cahoots with a racist police force.

But as reporters investigated Norvell, they found no evidence of a hate-spewing Klansman. He lived in a middle-class Memphis suburb. He had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as a “quiet, Christian man” who never mentioned civil rights, one way or another.

Upon posting bond, Norvell disappeared from the public eye until his trial that November.
The significance of bird shot

By presenting a blank slate, Norvell allowed white Southern conservatives to launch a counternarrative. The previous decade of Black activism, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma-to-Montgomery march, had taught them that open violence ignited public outrage and prompted civil rights legislation. So they distanced themselves from Norvell.

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson noted that Meredith was attacked “by birdshot by an out-of-state resident.” It foreshadowed the language employed by a host of Southern politicians and newspaper editorialists.

Again and again, in speeches and articles and letters, they mentioned that Norvell used bird shot. If he was aiming to kill, why pepper Meredith with pellets? They claimed a conspiracy against the white South.

“The whole affair smells badly of a plot instigated by the Communist-controlled rights groups and capitalized on by the press, the government, and all the other liberal screamers,” wrote one woman to Sen. James Eastland, as I discovered during my research. Like many others, she imagined that civil rights organizations paid Norvell to wound Meredith, which would stoke a media hubbub and invite the federal government to persecute white Southerners.

Searching for a conspiracy

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened in 1956 to protect white supremacy. In an incredible twist to this tale, a commission investigator authorized a US$5,000 bribe to Norvell’s attorney if Norvell would admit that liberals paid him to shoot Meredith.

According to commission files, an FBI agent from Mississippi, high-ranking officials of the Memphis Police Department and a Mississippi district attorney all agreed that Norvell’s shooting was “a hired job for the advancement of various civil rights groups.”

Segregationists kept grasping at this far-fetched scenario, exaggerating and manipulating it to serve the purpose of discrediting the Meredith March Against Fear. A Mississippi sheriff named Jack Cauthen went even further, suggesting Meredith hadn’t even been shot in the first place. He claimed to have put his arm around Meredith, who had rejoined the march for its final days.

“His back was just smooth as silk. There hadn’t been no pellets or shots in James’s back,” asserted Cauthen, as I found while conducting research for my book. “I don’t think he was shot, no sir.”

Echoes from the past

Norvell pleaded guilty and spent 18 months in Parchman Prison in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Despite being approached by many journalists and historians – including me – he never revealed his motive. He died in 2016.

In the 1960s, white southerners perceived that their way of life was under assault by big institutions, including the federal government and the media. They blamed the Civil Rights Movement on nefarious “outside agitators” determined to smash their status. Their political motivations led them down bizarre and fantastical paths, with some even fashioning themselves as the true victims of Norvell’s attack.

Racist conspiracy theories still plague American politics, from baseless accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to false assertions that global elites are engineering a “great replacement” of white Americans.

Even if these notions emerge from a modern sense of dislocation and anxiety, I think they have roots in the same crass bigotry that defined the conspiratorial segregationists of the civil rights era.

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The Social Security Trust Fund Will Run Dry In 2032 – What That Means For Retirees And Workers Who Hope To Retire

Social Security has lasted as long as it has thanks to the bipartisan deal that President Ronald Reagan and congressional leaders hammered out in 1983. AP Photo/Ed Reinke

BY JOHN W. DIAMOND

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR

PUBLIC FINANCE AT THE BAKER

INSTITUTE, RICE UNIVERSITY

Every year, the panel overseeing the trust fund for Social Security and Medicare publishes its annual financial report. And every year, its members make clear that the programs’ reserves will be exhausted by the time Gen X retires – meaning they will no longer be able to pay full scheduled benefits by the mid-2030s.

While many media outlets cover this news as a one-day story, this year’s report should be seen as a much more ominous warning. The latest projection, released on June 9, 2026, is that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2032, at which point incoming revenue can pay only about 78% of scheduled benefits. For the 1 in 5 Americans who receive Social Security, that means a potential across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 22% unless Congress acts.

What makes this year’s warning especially troubling is that the deterioration isn’t driven by a temporary downturn but by deeper demographic and policy changes: Fewer expected births, lower immigration, slower growth in the workforce and reduced future revenue from the taxation of Social Security benefits.

The fundamental challenge, though, has been obvious for years. There are too few current and future workers to support the growing number of retirees. And now, there are fresh headwinds that make the math even more daunting. Record debt levels and elevated interest rates are reducing the fiscal resources available for lawmakers to implement solutions, while declining immigration and birth rates mean that the supply of current and future workers is even smaller than previously projected.

These pressures don’t mean Social Security will disappear. It will always exist as long as workers and employers pay into the program. But for anyone who expects to retire starting in the early 2030s, the potential for a cut to benefits is real.

As a scholar of public finance, I argue that this looming deadline recalls the crisis policymakers faced in the early 1980s. Once again, the issue of reform is about to move from a distant worry to an immediate political problem. And failure to reach a bipartisan compromise will bring both economic pain and political damage.

Fresh pressures

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck their historic bipartisan compromise to extend the life of the program by raising taxes and the eligibility age. This time, the challenge will be far harder.

To start with, the federal government now carries a much higher debt burden, topping 100% of annual GDP, compared to about 35% in the early 1980s. And the Congressional Budget Office projects large deficits adding to that debt in the coming decades, with the annual budget shortfall rising from US$1.9 trillion in 2026 to $3.1 trillion in 2036 under current tax and spending laws. Public debt is projected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2036, leaving less and less fiscal room to patch Social Security.

Servicing that debt is also becoming more expensive. Although the Federal Reserve trimmed interest rates in 2024 and 2025, the cost of borrowing remains elevated as concerns over inflation grow, exacerbated by oil price spikes and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Markets now expect the Fed to hold rates steady for a while, and some investors are betting it may even raise them later this year.

The demographic picture is also unforgiving. Baby boomers continue to retire, Americans are living longer, and birth rates have fallen sharply. Since 2007, the U.S. birth rate has fallen by 23% and has remained below replacement level for years. The result is fewer future workers paying payroll taxes, even as the number of retirees grows.

A final factor is immigration.

While other aging countries have turned to immigration to shore up public finances and revitalize their labor force, the U.S. has taken the opposite approach. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, net migration to the U.S. is estimated to have fallen by 2.4 million between 2024 and 2026, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized migrants and its efforts to discourage green card applications.

The new report referenced these challenges, noting that lower immigration and fertility estimates will have “a negative projected effect on Social Security’s financial status.” It also addressed the effects of the massive policy bill that President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress pushed through in 2025, which among other things cut the income tax that retirees pay on Social Security benefits.

The near-term economic changes of that legislation will “have a positive effect,” the report said, but in the longer run it will also weaken the program’s finances.

A slow-motion crisis

It’s important to remember that before the 1983 deal was sealed, Social Security was far closer to insolvency than it is today. The program was nearing the point where it could no longer pay full benefits on time.

The problem was caused by a mix of high inflation, weak wage growth, the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, and mounting demographic pressure. Americans were living longer, birth rates were falling, and the number of workers supporting each beneficiary was declining.

The 1983 reform was negotiated under Reagan, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, with help from a bipartisan commission led by future Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. It addressed the program’s immediate financing crisis by accelerating scheduled increases in the payroll tax and phasing in a higher full retirement age, from 65 to 67. It also anticipated the retirement of the baby boomers and the growing burden they would place on future workers.

The historic overhaul, which came only after months of wrangling, bought the country time. Just as important, it showed that with bipartisan support, a Social Security deal is possible. But it also underscored the danger of waiting too long. When policymakers delay, the menu of options gets smaller, the required changes get larger, and the economic and political pain increases.

Social Security’s next crisis won’t arrive suddenly. It’s arriving in slow motion. The question isn’t whether the program can be fixed, but whether elected officials will act while they still have room to choose among less costly options. I believe the real lesson of 1983 is that waiting until the last minute will turn a chance for reform into a political emergency, and little good comes from governing by crisis.

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