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

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

BY UROCS KOVAC AND IKECHUKWU EJEKWUMADU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Whiteman country’

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

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

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

Natural athletes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultivating difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Morocco’s Hidden History: Archaeology, DNA And Carbon Dating Rewrite The Story Of The Ancient World

Satellite view of the Strait of Gibraltar, where Africa and Europe meet. NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL MISR Team

BY HAMZA BENATTIA

PREHISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

For decades, stories about the ancient Mediterranean have centred on the grand cultures of Greece, Rome, Phoenicia and Egypt. North-west Africa seldom enters the picture before the arrival of Phoenician traders on the Moroccan coast about 3,000 years ago.

But archaeology is now revealing a different story.

Long before the first Phoenician ships (from today’s Middle East) sailed the western Mediterranean (between today’s north Africa and southern Europe), communities in what is now Morocco were farming and herding animals. They were also crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and participating in long-distance exchanges.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked on archaeology projects across Morocco. We’ve been investigating the origins of farming, long-distance exchange and the emergence of complex societies there. In my most recent study, I brought together archaeological evidence, radiocarbon dates and genetic data spanning nearly three millennia.

The study reveals that between roughly 3800 and 500 BCE – a period that saw the construction of Stonehenge, the flourishing of New Kingdom Egypt and the rise of Phoenician maritime trade – north-west Africa was not a marginal frontier. It was a crossroads linking the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Saharan worlds.

This has important implications for how we understand Africa’s past. For too long, interpretations of the continent’s history have underestimated the complexity and dynamism of its societies. By bringing north-west Africa back into the picture, archaeology is helping to correct that imbalance and reveal a richer, more interconnected reality.

A centre of multiple worlds

Geography helps explain why north-west Africa occupied such a strategic position in Mediterranean prehistory. The Strait of Gibraltar, which separates present-day Morocco and Spain, is only about 14km wide at its narrowest point. It served as a natural corridor linking Africa and Europe.

Far from being isolated, communities in today’s northern Morocco were embedded in long-distance networks for millennia. They maintained contacts with Iberia and other Atlantic regions and they interacted with Saharan populations. Later, they engaged with Mediterranean traders and settlers.

They were not passive participants in these exchanges. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests that local communities actively participated in the networks that connected the western Mediterranean.

Early farmers and innovation

Farming was present in north-west Africa from at least 5400 BC, during the Neolithic period when agriculture was spreading across much of the western Mediterranean.

By around 3800 BC, communities in what is now Morocco were practising increasingly intensive farming and animal husbandry. One striking example is Oued Beht. At this large open-air settlement people cultivated crops, raised livestock and stored surplus food in hundreds of large underground pits.

Recent excavations reveal this was no small farming village. Covering around ten hectares, Oued Beht is among the largest agricultural settlements known in prehistoric Africa. The site may have supported a population of more than a thousand people, pointing to a level of organisation rarely documented in north-west Africa at this time.

These developments coincided with broader environmental changes, including the Sahara gradually becoming a desert. The dryness may have encouraged communities to invest more heavily in agriculture, food storage and long-term settlement in order to adapt to a less predictable environment.

At the same time, there’s clear evidence of interaction with Iberia, the peninsula that includes today’s Spain and Portugal. Shared painted pottery styles, together with ivory and ostrich eggshell objects, point to regular contacts across the Strait of Gibraltar. These local communities were already active participants in wider networks of exchange.

New influences and local continuity

During the third millennium BC, north-west Africa became part of the wider Bell Beaker phenomenon. It takes its name from distinctive bell-shaped drinking vessels which appear across a network of communities that stretch across Atlantic Europe and the western Mediterranean.

For decades, the presence of Bell Beaker pottery in the region was interpreted as evidence that local communities were simply adopting cultural innovations from Europe.

Yet in Morocco, Bell Beaker objects are found alongside distinctive local traditions. This suggests local communities were selectively integrating new elements into existing cultural frameworks.

This was clearly a process of exchange, adaptation and local agency.

The elusive Bronze Age

The second millennium BC remains one of the least understood periods in north-west African prehistory. In Iberia, large, fortified settlements and clear social hierarchies emerge. The archaeological record in north-west Africa is more fragmentary.

Even so, there are important clues.

Burial practices such as stone-built cist graves point to changes in social organisation. At sites like Kach Kouch, there is evidence for settled farming communities with round houses, storage facilities and animal herding.

Ballintober sword found in Morocco. 

There are also signs of long-distance connections continuing into this period. For example, a bronze sword recovered from the bed of a river in northern Morocco has close parallels in the British Isles. This suggests links extending far beyond the Mediterranean.

Encounters with the Phoenicians

By the early first millennium BC, Phoenician traders and settlers from the eastern Mediterranean – today’s Lebanon – began establishing settlements along the north African coast. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as a process of colonisation, with local populations as passive recipients of a more advanced culture.

Recent archaeological evidence challenges this.

At sites like Kach Kouch, local communities continued their own architectural traditions and lifestyle. They selectively adopted new elements, like wheel-made pottery and iron tools.

Kach Kouch and other settlements suggest that these societies negotiated encounters with incoming groups. They incorporated new ideas into existing cultural traditions on their own terms.

The arrival of the Phoenicians, then, did not mark the beginning of complex societies in Morocco. It was a new chapter in a much longer history of interaction, adaptation and exchange.

These advances reflect decades of work by Moroccan and international research teams. Much remains for archaeologists to do. Large parts of the region are still underexplored and new discoveries have the potential to transform our understanding even further.

What is already clear, however, is that the prehistory of north-west Africa is a story of local communities actively shaping their own place in the ancient world.

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Appolonia: The Story Of An African Kingdom That Resisted The Atlantic Slave Trade

Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped from the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. National Maritime Museum, London, CC BY

BY NANA KESSE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CLARK UNIVERSITY

The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s.

The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external conquest.

Europeans lacked the geographical knowledge, immunity to endemic tropical diseases, and the military power to venture into the African interior. So they became dependent on African states and merchant elites for the supply of captives.

By controlling coastal ports, regulating market access, and managing the interior trade routes that brought captives to the coast, these African brokers enabled and shaped the European trade in human beings.

Yet, this internal participation was rarely uniform. While certain powerful African societies and groups largely procured captives from weaker communities through warfare or raids, a few centralised African states chose neither to fully participate in nor completely abstain from the slave trade.

One such society was the Kingdom of Appolonia (today known as the Nzema State) in the southwestern Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Throughout the four centuries of Atlantic slavery, Appolonia traded only 352 captives while other Gold Coast towns like Elmina and Cape Coast each shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved people.

As a historian of west Africa, particularly Ghana, specialising in environmental and water history as well as the slave trade, I have spent nearly a decade researching Appolonia’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. My recent study reveals that Appolonia was the only port region on the Gold Coast where the Atlantic slave trade did not thrive, although indigenous African slavery was practised in the kingdom. Appolonia stands out as a statistical and geographical outlier within the slave trade economy.

Appolonia’s story raises several critical questions. Why did the kingdom trade so few enslaved people? Why is it important to study regions of Africa where the slave trade was less dominant? And what do outliers like Appolonia teach us about historical and reparative justice?

Appolonia in historical context

Appolonia is an Akan society in southwestern Ghana, located at the border with Côte d'Ivoire. The Portuguese named this region after Saint Appolonia, an Egyptian Christian virgin, because they discovered the area on her festival day.

The region was made up of small villages that came together to establish the Appolonian Kingdom in the late 1600s. It was here that Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was born in 1909.

The founding of the Appolonian Kingdom coincided with other grand historical developments on the Gold Coast. These include the rise of the Asante Kingdom to superpower status and the transformation of the region into a centre for the Atlantic slave trade.

These events drew Appolonia into the larger Atlantic economy. However, Appolonia was probably the only Gold Coast society that effectively said “no” to the Atlantic slave trade.

Saying “no” did not mean a complete abstinence. The 352 enslaved individuals that Appolonia shipped account for 0.0028% of the Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. My intention is not to reduce these precious lives to mere statistics. Rather, I aim to show that, in percentage terms, Appolonia’s involvement in the trade was minimal.

To illustrate this point, let’s examine some comparative data.

Distribution of slave exports from the Gold Coast. Nana Kesse, Author provided (no reuse)

The table displays slave exports from various regions of the Gold Coast. This information was obtained from the SlaveVoyages database, compiled over decades by various researchers in an international collaborative effort. It offers statistics on enslaved individuals shipped from Africa and those who survived the journey.

For instance, in the 18th-century Gold Coast, port towns like Anomabo recorded 168,348 slave exports, Cape Coast 100,434 and Elmina 85,636 – compared with Appolonia’s 352.

Consider the figures alongside the historical population densities of these areas.

During the 1700s, Anomabu had approximately 8,750 inhabitants; yet a staggering 168,348 captives were shipped from there. This indicates significant slave trading. Similarly, Cape Coast and Elmina had projected populations of around 5,000 and 25,000 residents, yet recorded high slave exports.

Appolonia, on the other hand, had an estimated population of 15,600-19,600 inhabitants but traded only 352.

What this means

Why did Appolonia trade so few enslaved people? Using demographic database analysis, European archival records, and oral histories, my research suggests two main reasons.

First, Appolonia was not a slaving society. Its economy depended rather on the gold and ivory trade.

Second, the kingdom implemented policies, such as the amonle covenant, that prevented the sale of Appolonian subjects. Amonle was a sacred ritual involving human sacrifice of Appolonian royals and the mixing of their blood with a special herbal concoction. It was then drunk by both Appolonian rulers and migrants who settled in the kingdom.

This powerful ritual served as the binding oath against selling Appolonian locals and refugees, cursing anyone who broke the oath. This policy undermined any internal system for producing enslaved people within the kingdom for sale.

The question of reparations

Appolonia’s story further complicates our understanding and approach to seeking historical justice and reparations for the slave trade. It is one thing for a known victim to demand justice and reparations from an identifiable perpetrator, whether through symbolic acts like an apology, or through monetary compensation.

It’s a different matter when the identities of both the victim and the perpetrator are unknown – or when the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same. Who dispenses reparations to whom?

In the case of Appolonia, we do not know the identities of the 352 victims exported, nor have scholars, including myself, been able to trace these captives to a specific African homeland.

We have not found historical records indicating that the people of Appolonia captured or purchased these individuals for resale. Given this context, should Appolonia be expected to offer reparations? If yes, to whom?

Conversely, is it ethically justifiable for Appolonia to seek reparative justice from the unknown Europeans who purchased the 352 captives?

Appolonia’s story complicates the call for reparative justice. However, it does not contradict the landmark March 2026 United Nations resolution officially declaring the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity”. For the slave trade is indeed the most violent and catastrophic of the many atrocities committed against Africans and African descended people.

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One Health In A Fractured World: Why Global Health Governance Must Adapt To Geopolitical Fragmentation

BY CLAIRE J. STANDLEY AND ERIN M. SORRELL

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in global health systems and underscored how interconnected drivers such as changes in land usage, urbanization, and climate amplify zoonotic disease threats. One Health, an integrated approach linking human, animal, and ecosystem health, has gained institutional traction via global governance approaches, yet faces persistent structural challenges, including siloed mandates, funding misalignment, and limited enforcement. We argue for pragmatic, polycentric governance—local leadership supported by regional mini-lateral coalitions and existing bi- and multilateral regimes—to operationalize One Health sustainably and equitably.

Introduction

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the weaknesses of global health systems to infectious diseases. However, less recognized was how the emergence of this novel virus highlighted the global changes converging to heighten outbreak risks: increased human-animal contact and agricultural intensification, accelerated population growth and urbanization, and changing weather and climatic patterns. These dynamics are playing out repeatedly, from the devastation to the poultry industry—where migratory birds and marine mammals suffer from rampant H5N1 influenza—to surges in mosquito-borne virus infections like chikungunya and Oropouche across the Americas. While these examples demonstrate that health threats are increasingly transboundary, global governance mechanisms are at risk of fragmentation amid political instability and declining trust in multilateral institutions. This article argues that given current geopolitical fragmentation, One Health governance must evolve from idealistic coordination, toward pragmatic, resilient, and multi-level cooperation.

 
What is One Health?

The term “One Health” first emerged in the early 21st century due to growing scientific recognition that infectious diseases of wildlife and livestock could negatively impact humans, and vice versa. Since then, the most widely adopted definition is that of the One Health High Level Expert Panel:

“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems.”

Early origins of One Health focused on operational collaboration to contain specific infectious disease outbreaks. Yet, the field has grown considerably, benefitting from formalized, interdisciplinary frameworks and governance systems. The most prominent of these is the Quadripartite, established in 2010 between the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH; formerly OIE), and subsequently joined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2022. The Quadripartite led the development of the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) (OHJPA), providing a blueprint for how these organizations would coordinate to sustainably advance One Health collaboration and implementation, prevent pandemics, and contribute to enhancing resilient health systems.

Since its inception, the Quadripartite has successfully raised the profile of One Health, earning commitments from the G7, G20 and numerous individual countries to adopt the approach in addressing global health threats, particularly for pandemic preparedness and response. The establishment of the One Health High-Level Expert Panel brought geographically and culturally diverse interdisciplinary expertise to the Quadripartite, facilitating better navigation of policy processes and anticipation of implementation barriers. Workshops in different WHO regions further advocated for adoption of One Health strategies, enhanced regional and national coordination, and resulted in the creation of country roadmaps. Yet ultimately, such efforts are limited by the resources of the Quadripartite and critically rely on national ownership, financing mechanisms, and momentum to move from strategy to operationalization.

 
Intrinsic Challenges with One Health Governance

The effort to coordinate sectors with responsibilities in One Health policy and implementation may appear straightforward in theory, but faces persistent structural problems as well as legal and normative weaknesses in practice.

While broad support for One Health exists across the various sectors involved, they often operate with different mandates, budgets, and data systems, making coordination difficult or ad hoc rather than automatic. Though these operational difficulties are being addressed in some settings through multisectoral national and regional strategies, integration is unlikely to ever be fully equitable. One Health has traditionally been promoted with a human health focus by the Global North, marginalizing local and Indigenous knowledge of the cultural and environmental drivers of emergence. This imbalance is mirrored in funding: expecting the environment, veterinary, and agriculture sectors to contribute personnel, knowledge, and consumables to a human health-centric preparedness and response cycle—without acknowledging fundamental discrepancies in resources and mandates—will not resolve the problem.

Government funding is also often reactive—focused on crisis response—whereas One Health approaches to epidemic preparedness depend on sustained investment in prevention. It promotes monitoring ecosystems, conducting surveillance across animal reservoirs, and detecting early spillover. While One Health encompasses far more than just infectious diseases, this remains its most widely applied use case and the one that has gained the most political traction to date. As such, it has become difficult to advocate for One Health multisectoral funding without a looming global health security threat, resulting in trade-offs between sectors.

Finally, One Health as a global initiative lacks a central governing body with real power. While WHO, WOAH, UNEP, and FAO collaborate via the Quadripartite, no one organization can enforce policy across sectors or countries. Similarly, although OHJPA provides a comprehensive framework for advancing One Health and offers technical assistance to support national implementation targets, its initiatives are non-binding and completely voluntary.

The Added Negative Impact of Global Fragmentation

Global fragmentation is increasingly undermining One Health governance. The shift away from Pax Americana and a US-led world order towards a multipolar system has eroded trust in multilateral institutions, including those of the Quadripartite. The WHO has been most dramatically affected, with the US withdrawal prompting a comprehensive review of its core functions and strategic streamlining in response to new fiscal constraints. There have been knock-on effects across other global bodies: the US presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) in 2026 has refocused its efforts towards economic growth and prosperity, moving away from prior high-level priorities—such as the Sustainable Development Goals (South Africa) and renewable energy (Brazil)—that were more closely aligned with One Health objectives.

This geopolitical fragmentation has been shaped by the prioritization of national interests, the politicization of global health, and international conflicts. Vaccine nationalism during COVID-19, whereby high-income countries disproportionately over-purchased limited supplies of life-saving vaccines, hampered efforts of multilateral initiatives to provide vaccines to countries unable to afford them directly from pharmaceutical companies, further demonstrating the limitations of global cooperation when it is most needed. The politicization of the origins of the pandemic not only directly influenced the US decision to withdraw from the WHO, but also cast a pall over scientific efforts related to zoonotic diseases. Global health and foreign assistance budgets are easy targets in this period of fragmentation when defense budgets are on the rise, as was the case when NATO members agreed to increase their defense spending to support Ukraine. While defense stakeholders increasingly recognize the value of a One Health approach, their integration into One Health governance needs careful consideration.

 
Rethinking One Health Governance: From Idealism to Pragmatism

Moving from idealism to pragmatism requires confronting structural, political, and operational realities. One Health, at its core, is aspirational, requiring efficient collaboration, shared priorities, and sustained funding across a variety of sectors. The stark reality is that international governance systems are, as aforementioned, fragmented and unlikely to be sufficient; a polycentric model provides an alternative approach. Referred to as polycentric governance, this model involves systems in which authority is distributed across levels rather than centralized. Each center operates semi-independently, interacting through cooperation, competition, and coordination, while adapting to local contexts and contributing to broader system goals.

For One Health, centers of authority span communities, governments, and international organizations. The approach emphasizes local actors taking the lead, with higher levels providing support and coordination, leveraging existing and functional structures rather than creating new ones. Local communities are on the front lines of spillover—they are often the first to observe emerging risks but may lack the necessary resources to report these events or respond effectively. Governments are the seat of policy and regulation, housing national surveillance systems and allocating budgets for preparedness and response, but, as noted earlier, lack of coordination and siloed reporting systems prevent effective response. Thus, intergovernmental organizations such as the African Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can come into play and facilitate coordination between borders. For example, the African Union has a One Health Data Alliance Africa Project, which seeks to “enhance digitalized One Health governance” across the continent. As such, polycentric governance does not replace centralized authority, rather it complements it through a “system of systems.”

One Health events often require decisive action at local or regional levels without waiting for global alignment. Mini-lateral cooperation—small coalitions of middle-powered willing states—help narrow the focus on polycentric governance. It can translate One Health from broad visions into tangible outcomes. Cooperation like this can prove to be quite effective, as One Health challenges are typically geographically and ecologically focused, making global agreements inefficient. Mini-lateral groups are politically aligned sufficiently to cooperate effectively and capable of acting quickly on a shared problem, focusing on specific outcomes rather than broad mandates. One Health mini-lateralism can therefore leverage a variety of platforms including regional networks that share cross-border surveillance data, functional coalitions established for specific technical issues like vaccine research and development, antimicrobial resistance monitoring or climate-health data sharing, or public-private partnerships linking policy to operational action. One example is the newly launched WOAH-PREZODE Working Group, which is convening experts across diverse One Health fields to bridge gaps between scientific evidence and policy formulation. While not automatically resolving the structural challenges highlighted above, such efforts provide stronger opportunities to set shared objectives that rebalance sectoral inequities and prioritize local knowledge while supporting regional priorities.

When pursuing intergovernmental cooperation on One Health—be it at the mini-lateral or multilateral level) —rather than creating new frameworks or initiating new agreements, a more effective strategy may be to mainstream One Health into existing regimes that have authority, financing, and compliance mechanisms, notably climate, trade, and pandemic governance. The goal, then, is to incorporate human–animal–ecosystems linkages where decisions are already being made. Climate agreements and trade frameworks provide clear future opportunities to integrate One Health principles. However, lessons from the 2025 Pandemic Treaty should be taken to heart: while One Health was formally recognized in the Treaty as central to pandemic preparedness, important points related to implementation and funding, especially for lower- and middle-income countries, were pushed to subsequent deliberations and left unanswered.

Finally, these examples underscore the importance of aligning incentives for One Health, both between participating sectors and across levels of polycentric governance. As major powers pivot to bilateral approaches to foreign assistance and health funding, countries must react by identifying areas of convergence with One Health structures and programs. Mini-lateral coalitions can expand through inclusion of emerging economies—providing opportunities to center new voices and advance equity—as well as through the engagement of non-governmental actors: philanthropic entities, industry, and civil society organizations can all play important roles and, in turn, benefit from greater One Health integration.

 
Conclusion

Experts suggest that there is approximately a 50/50 chance of another deadly pandemic before 2050, and the likelihood is that it will be zoonotic in origin. While the benefits of One Health encompass far more than infectious diseases, the reality is that pandemic preparedness offers a critical incentive for the levels of political and operational commitment needed for establishing sustainable and effective One Health governance. Though some may argue that geopolitical fragmentation makes cooperation needed for a global One Health approach unrealistic, we suggest that flexible, networked governance can replace, and even outperform, simplistic visions of top-down oversight. Global change is accelerating biological and environmental risks faster than our current systems can respond: One Health is the only framework designed to manage these interconnected threats. With appropriate and effective governance to guide implementation, it can provide practical, risk-reducing strategies to strengthen ecosystem health, support productive economies, and bolster national and regional security.

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The Sahel Region Is Less Secure Than Ever: Foreign Forces Just Add To The Cycle Of Violence

French soldiers on patrol in Diabaly, Mali, 2013. Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images

BY NINA LILEN

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,

LUND UNIVERSITY

Several of Mali’s major cities experienced coordinated attacks in April by a new coalition of jihadists and separatist groups.

As the coalition took over the town of Kidal in the north of Mali, images of Russian troops being escorted out of the town after negotiations were cabled out across global media.

Russia, now in the shape of Africa Corps and previously the Wagner Group, has been the Malian military’s external security partner since the beginning of 2022. It replaced French and European troops from the counter-terrorism operation Barkhane and Taskforce Takuba. France had deployed a force of 5,000 troops from 2014 to 2022. European special forces numbered 1,000 between 2020 and 2022. Both missions were forced to leave as relations between France and the Malian junta grew tense.

The strategic realignment, from western and multilateral forces to Russian troops, expanded in the region. In Burkina Faso, which experienced two coups in 2022, the French troops were expelled at the start of 2023, as 200 Russian troops moved in.

In the summer of 2023, the Malian authorities also kicked out the decade-old 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission. Niger’s junta, which took power the same year, followed suit and expelled the EU’s operations in the country six months later, before accepting a few hundred Russian troops.

During the past decade I have researched external security interventions in the Sahel and analysed their justifications, development on the ground, and consequences for political and security environments.

I conclude from my research that the external interventions have not stabilised the region. More than a decade after the first major interventions, the Sahel is more fragmented, militarised and violent than before.

Yet the persistence of insecurity also serves political purposes.

For military juntas, the jihadist threat justifies continued rule and repression. For Russia, the region has become a showcase for anti-western influence and security partnerships in Africa. For western actors, jihadist expansion, migration concerns and fears of regional instability are used as reasons for security engagement despite repeated failures.

The complex interactions between these actors have resulted in a continuous, strategic circle of violence, where civilians are the first victims.

On the ground

On the ground, interventions have often evolved in unpredictable ways through ad hoc decisions and informal interactions between local and external actors.

For example, they have shared logistical and medical assistance and intelligence.

More broadly, the external interventions strengthened militaries as political actors, reinforcing an already biased civil-military balance across the region.

“Security in the Sahel” became the moniker that framed the western and multilateral interventions in the region from 2013 onwards. Improving the capacities, capabilities and professionalism of the national security forces became the official objectives of these interventions, closely linked to the broader aim of defeating the jihadist insurgencies.

Framing the intersecting crises in the Sahel as a security issue also meant that security actors had the task of resolving it. The importance, status and budgets of the national militaries thus increased as the security situation deteriorated. A heavily tilted civil-military imbalance was the result.

As military officers took over power through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, a strategic realignment towards Russia began, to maintain military rule.

The Russian Wagner group allowed the newly installed juntas to entrench their power, while “deprofessionalising” the forces through harassment, attacks and massacres of civilians.

Research shows for example that civilian targeting accounted for 71% of the Wagner Group’s involvement in political violence in Mali between December 2021 and July 2022. This strategy of attacking civilians has made recruitment easier for jihadist groups. They could increase their ranks by exploiting grievances.

The latest attacks in Mali in April 2026 demonstrate the military junta’s failure, together with its Russian security partners, to contain the jihadist groups’ expansion.

They also reveal that Russia is in the country mainly to keep the military junta in power. Assimi Goïta, Mali’s military leader, reconfirmed the partnership with Russia after the attacks in spite of their failure on the battlefield.

The military leader needs regime maintenance more than ever, and the Russians need to be in the country for continued geopolitical influence on the African continent.

Conclusion

The result is that while all external actors claim to fight instability, the current regional order depends on continuing insecurity.

Stabilisation risks becoming less about resolving conflict than about managing insecurity in ways that sustain regimes, partnerships and geopolitical influence.

Foreign interventions, in combination with national actors’ ambitions, have helped to transform the region into a space of militarised regime survival, jihadist expansion and geopolitical competition between Russia and western democracies.

As military approaches have repeatedly proven insufficient to solve the intersecting crises in the Sahel, pressured military juntas may now be forced to negotiate with jihadist groups. That is likely to result in new, hybrid spaces of power and governance.

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The ‘Warrior Ethos’ Promises Victory — History Says It Leads To Defeat

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena watch a parade held in Hitler’s honor in 1938. Behind them, from left: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. Bettmann/Getty Images

BY JOHN BROICH

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTOTY,

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”

Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.

Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.

Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”

Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.

I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.

The fascist theory of war

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

The closed circuit

Consider Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Before becoming Hitler’s foreign minister, he was a wine salesman whose years in Canada became his qualification for understanding America. He attached himself to Hitler and was rewarded with a top seat in his government, where Ribbentrop’s signature contribution was overruling the diplomats who warned that Americans would fight if pushed too far by the Axis.

The Nazi view prevailed: Americans were too racially mixed, too soft, too consumed by money to be dangerous. When Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, it did so partly on that disdain for what Hitler called a “mongrel nation.” Ribbentrop was among the most consequentially wrong foreign ministers in modern history – he’d also misjudged Britain’s willingness to join the war over the invasion of Poland – still, he kept his job.

The ideology that produced Ribbentrop’s overconfidence also produced the Nazi theory of the Eastern Front: that Slavic peoples – fundamentally inferior and tainted by Bolshevism – would collapse within weeks. But the Red Army didn’t collapse. Hitler fired the officers who reported as much and demanded more of the same operations that had already failed. Operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to take weeks, stretched to years.

Attempting to match Hitler’s conquests and assert dominance over the Mediterranean, Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 with shorthanded divisions, in mountain terrain and at the start of winter, because he believed Italian spirit would overwhelm Greek resistance in two weeks. His generals had doubts, but many did not express them. The Greeks counterattacked, but Mussolini blamed his generals’ “insufficient will,” the only kind of failure his theory allowed. Germany had to intervene.

What the leader said happened

Connected to the fascist superiority complex is a contempt for feedback, creating a closed information system that can’t register failure, tolerate disagreement or revise a plan. Strategy requires accurate reporting, even when the news is bad, and the willingness to be wrong. Fascist regimes punish the first and refuse the second.

German high command was still reporting a controlled advance in November 1942 when its 6th Army, some 330,000 soldiers, was being encircled at Stalingrad. Hitler had declared the city practically taken; the press never reported the Soviet counteroffensive that surrounded it. When the remnants finally surrendered on Feb. 2, 1943, it was a turning point in the war – Germany’s first catastrophic defeat on the Eastern Front, from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.

Mussolini bragged about his mighty army of 8 million soldiers while 3.5 million – the real number – were being routed on three fronts in as many years.

Imperial Japan fused racial supremacy with a military code that forbade surrender and treated anyone who did as subhuman. Loyalty to the emperor was absolute; questioning his depiction of reality was betrayal.

In that environment, officers had every incentive to lie up the chain of command when reality on the ground did not match what leaders wanted to hear. For example, after the Battle of Midway, a catastrophic defeat for Japan in June 1942, naval headquarters filed reports that bore little resemblance to what happened. Later that year, the Imperial Navy told Tokyo they had sunk twelve American ships near today’s Taiwan when they had merely damaged two.

Two years of retreat later, the kamikaze program – which sent some 3,900 pilots to their deaths in suicidal crashes against Allied ships – was the logical conclusion: Let pilots prove their loyalty by dying.

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How America’s Independence From England Revolutionized US Philanthropy

John Hancock, like many American men and women of his generation, transformed the new nation’s charitable activities. Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images

BY AMANDA MONIZ

DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN CURATOR OF 

PHILANTHROPY, SMITHSONIAN

ISTITUTION

John Hancock did something revolutionary 250 years ago when the Massachusetts merchant signed the Declaration of Independence, announcing to the world that 13 English colonies were freeing themselves from Great Britain and from monarchy.

About a decade later, he signed up as a member of a charity aiding drowning strangers.

That endeavor was revolutionary, too.

As I explain in my 2016 book, “From Empire to Humanity,” the American Revolution transformed how Americans, and also Britons, engaged in giving. Many Americans turned to philanthropy after gaining independence to pursue their ideals of life, liberty and happiness for the new nation.

And while curating the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s “Giving in America” exhibition, for which I collect objects telling stories about Americans’ volunteering, donating and working to aid others, I’m often reminded that Americans still pursue these ideals through their everyday philanthropy.
Charity in North American colonies

Hancock, who was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on Jan. 23, 1737, grew up in a world where men like his uncle Thomas Hancock dominated charitable activity. Thomas Hancock had made a fortune in business ventures, including the slave trade and military contracting. When he died, he left an array of charitable bequests, including one used for Communion silver for his church.

By having Thomas Hancock’s name engraved on the silver plates, the church leaders highlighted what colonial Americans knew: Leadership in philanthropy, as in society at large, was in the hands of elite white men.

That uncle raised John after his father’s death, educating him so he would be prepared for business and civic leadership.

When colonists fell on hard times, they might be eligible for an early form of governmental benefits, known as “poor relief.” They could also turn to their churches, to one another or to a small number of ethnic aid societies, such as Boston’s Scots Society, for support.

In the mid-1700s, Americans founded a number of new welfare and educational institutions, including colleges and charity schools. Benjamin Franklin, a leading philanthropic innovator, helped establish the Pennsylvania Hospital with mixed public and private funding. That funding model would later become common for charitable institutions.

The Revolutionary War interrupted these developments. After independence was won in 1783, the number of charitable organizations and institutions would soon soar.
Humane societies to protect people

U.S. charitable institutions began to rapidly change in the 1780s, as Americans sought to reform society by establishing organizations to support people in need.

One of those groups was the charity dedicated to rescuing drowning victims and aiding shipwrecked sailors that John Hancock joined, along with Paul Revere. It was known as the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and, like other similar groups, offered rewards or honors to motivate people to undertake the risky work of saving people from watery graves.

Americans in several cities, along with their peers in the British Isles, the Caribbean and Europe, worked together by publicizing resuscitation techniques, sharing information on effective methods and offering each other moral support.

“Humane” was a popular word in the names of charities dedicated to an array of causes in this era, long before it became associated with the protection of animal welfare.
Philanthropy’s meaning at the time

Throughout the 1700s and much of the 1800s, the word “philanthropy” referred to a sentiment – the love of humanity. That reflected the word’s origins: It’s derived from the Greek words for “love” – “philos” – and “anthropos” – “man.”

For Americans of the founding generation, philanthropy meant, above all else, aiding strangers – people outside their local, religious or ethnic community. Spurred by African Americans’ advocacy, some prominent white Americans, such as Alexander Hamilton, joined antislavery societies, while Northern states gradually began passing antislavery laws.

Making maritime travel safer for people of all backgrounds and nationalities was another way to uphold this value of universal benevolence. Humane societies’ rescuers and rescued people alike included African Americans and foreign mariners, including some from Asia and the Spanish empire. African Americans received awards from anti-drowning groups using the same criteria applied to white people.

In 1794, one of the highest honors went to Dolphin Garler, a Black man in Plymouth, Massachusetts, who had risked his life to rescue a young boy from drowning. Many Americans at this time saw benevolence as a criteria for citizenship. By lauding Garler, the leaders of the Massachusetts Humane Society were challenging other white Americans to recognize Black Americans’ humanity.

Like humane societies, other charities innovated by giving aid across ethnic or denominational lines as Americans built bonds in the new nation. Among them was New York Hospital, which had “charity to all” as its motto and had a diverse patient population. Many were British, Irish and German, with small numbers of people, probably mariners, from places like Portugal and South Asia. The hospital also treated African Americans in segregated wards.

Another new charity embracing this new more universal approach was the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, established in New York City in 1797. It supported poor widows with small children and helped the widows find jobs. While the organization excluded African American women, it innovated by aiding white women without regard to their ethnic or religious background.
New leaders with new causes

The Widows Society, as it was known, was notable for another reason. It was one of the first charities founded and led by women in the new United States.

Before the late 1780s, women made charitable donations to institutions run by men and gave personal alms, but women didn’t lead organizations.

In New York, Scottish immigrant Isabella Graham and other women challenged traditional roles by founding the Widows Society in 1797. That they came together from various Protestant backgrounds was notable at the time.

Within a few years, Eliza Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s wife, would join and help lead the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York, which grew out of the Widows Society.

And yes, that’s the orphanage Eliza Hamilton sings about in “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical.

Black Americans likewise broke ground by creating charities and independent churches in the founding era. Black men like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, for example, created the Free African Society, a mutual aid organization, in 1787 in Philadelphia.

In addition to supporting members of the Black community at times of need, the Free African Society led to the creation of independent Black churches as African Americans struggled for inclusion.
Revolutionizing charity management

Founding charities was one thing. Running them was another.

Americans applied managerial skills acquired from operating business, churches and households to caring for people in distress. They also became pros at the business of fundraising: cultivating donors, hosting fundraising events and publishing annual reports, including names of donors.

In short, Americans developed the critical skills to make philanthropy work.

Philadelphia doctor and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush was one of the most skilled philanthropic communicators. As he undertook one humanitarian endeavor after another, Rush collaborated with philanthropic leaders like Isabella Graham and Richard Allen.

Like others of his generation, Rush devoted himself to reforming the country and world. Medical philanthropy, education, antislavery, prison reform – he was engaged in all of them.

He routinely placed excerpts of his letters with other humanitarian leaders in newspapers. Publicity documents, he knew, helped build momentum for humanitarian causes.

Many others shared his belief in the power of philanthropy to help make the world anew.

The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ “provision made for Ship-wrecked Marriners is also highly estimable in the view of every philanthropic mind,” George Washington said in 1788. “These works of charity & goodwill towards men … presage an æra of still farther improvements.”

This goodwill could go global. Cooperating across the Atlantic in this cause and others helped Americans and Britons reaffirm and reimagine their bonds.
Bedrock of the American experiment

It was only when rich Americans like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil baron John D. Rockefeller began to make massive donations and set up their own foundations in the late 1800s and early 1900s that the word philanthropy would come to be associated with giving on a massive scale.

As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I believe it’s worth remembering that the founding generation embraced civic engagement, organizational innovation and generosity as essential pillars in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

For that generation, philanthropy – love of humanity – was the bedrock of the American experiment in republican government.

Africa Has The World’s Greatest Genetic Diversity, Yet It’s Missing From Research: We’re Filling The Gap

Africa has the richest genetic diversity, making it crucial that its people feature in genetic databases. Jacob Wackerhausen / IStock Getty Images

BY MICHELE RAMSAY AND ANANYO CHOUDHURY

Throughout history, most of the world’s genomic research has relied on DNA data from people of European ancestry.

A genome is the full DNA code of about three billion (a thousand million) bases, including all the chromosomes. Each person has two genomes: one from their mother and the other from their father.

Well resourced environments favour European-based research generating hundreds of thousands of whole human genomes with associated health data. Yet modern humans, our species, evolved on the African continent. African populations therefore contain the deepest branches of human genetic history and the greatest genetic diversity on the planet. Yet the continent remains strikingly underrepresented in global genomic databases.

The African continent is populated by people from over 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups, yet genetic data exist for fewer than a hundred groups. This is akin to having a GPS map of a city with only 5% of the streets marked and the rest left blank.

This bias has profoundly shaped modern medicine, from disease prediction tools to ancestry testing. And it’s why researchers increasingly recognise that studying African genomes has the potential to reveal insights and health-related biological pathways never observed before.

As a team of researchers we were involved in identifying under-represented groups in nine African countries for human whole-genome sequencing. Our multidisciplinary team involved in the Assessing Genetic Diversity in Africa project (AGenDA) has worked out ethical ways to obtain, record and share genetic material and to add to global databases.

The AGenDA dataset alone is expected to uncover millions of previously unknown genetic variants and analyses are underway. These discoveries will inform research into diseases that affect populations in African and worldwide. They include diabetes, heart disease, cancer and neurological or mental health conditions.

This is only a first step. Capturing the full scope of African genomic diversity will require hundreds of thousands of genomes. The project aims to bridge some of the most obvious gaps rather than fully map the continent’s diversity.

But expanding African genomic data is not only important for Africa. It will strengthen global biomedical science.

What it takes

Modern genomic science relies on large databases of DNA sequences to understand disease risk, ancestry and human evolution. These databases underpin a wide range of scientific and medical tools. They are used in medical research, disease prediction, drug development, ancestry testing and increasingly in artificial intelligence models that analyse health data.

When a population is absent from a reference database, a library of whole genome sequences, science simply cannot detect it. Genetic algorithms work by comparing individuals to reference populations. In the absence of a specific reference population, the algorithms will assign the closest available match.

This problem becomes particularly visible in ancestry testing. This is a form of genetic testing often used to learn more about biological heritage. Because African reference data remain incomplete, people with African ancestry may receive vague or misleading results about their origins.

Without more African genomic data the assignment of specific ancestry may be incorrect. In addition, disease risk predictions would be misleading. For example it has been shown that standard doses for medications like warfarin (a blood thinner) or efavirenz (an HIV medication) could be ineffective or toxic for people who harbour specific variants that are more common in African populations.

Prior knowledge of the distribution of such variants in a population could be key to deciding the suitability of a drug for patients from that population.

Filling some of the gaps

The AGenDA project was designed to begin addressing some of the gaps in genome data and African representation. This project involved large multi-country scientific collaborations across the continent. It also required co-ordinating research across multiple ethics committees, regulatory frameworks and institutions. Scientists collaborated with research partners in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

The aim was not simply to increase the number of African genomes in global databases. Instead, the team carefully selected populations to address major geographic and ethnolinguistic gaps in genomic data.

But generating large genomic databases requires careful community engagement and consent from participants to share their data. Biological samples for DNA extraction must be collected and the sequencing performed one base at a time.

We therefore built community engagement and culturally appropriate consent processes into the project from the beginning.

More than 1,000 whole genomes were sequenced from communities that had rarely been included in previous genetic studies. These included:

hunter-gatherer populations

Nilo-Saharan-speaking communities

Afro-Asiatic speakers

understudied Bantu-speaking populations

communities from north Africa and the Indian Ocean islands.

Selecting samples required careful consideration of what African diversity actually represents.

Genetic diversity does not map neatly onto modern national borders. Instead, researchers considered a range of additional factors. These included:

poorly represented geographic regions in genomic databases

major ancestral population histories

languages spoken and self-identified ethnic groups

recent patterns of migration.

In some cases, neighbouring communities may appear close due to geographic proximity but have distinct genetic histories that reflect population separations thousands of years ago.

Why studying African genomes benefits science everywhere

African genomes contain more genetic variation than populations on any other continent. This diversity provides a powerful resource for scientific discovery. When researchers study more diverse populations they are better able to achieve a number of things.

Firstly, they can identify new genetic variants.

Secondl,y they can investigate evolutionary forces, like natural selection, that have shaped the genomes of people in different parts of the world.

And thirdly, they can pinpoint variants that influence health and disease.

More inclusive genomic datasets are also essential as genomics becomes integrated with artificial intelligence systems that analyse medical data and predict health outcomes. Future medical technologies could be biased to work best for whoever is represented in the data.

Ultimately, expanding African genomic representation will help ensure that the benefits of genomic medicine are shared more equitably. At the same time, it will improve the accuracy and depth of understanding in global genetic science.

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Mali’s Armed Groups Fill A Government Vacuum – Addressing This Is Key To Ending The Violence

BY NORMAN SEMPIJJA AND MUHAMMED NDIAYE

Mali has been in a state of political turmoil since 2012. That year saw a military coup as well as armed groups taking over northern regions of the west African country. In the intervening years, efforts at establishing transitional governments have failed, culminating in the military junta dissolving and banning all political parties in May 2025.

In addition, the country has seen waves of military interventions by outside players like France, the US and most recently Russia. All have invested heavily in trying to contain the extremist threat in Mali.

But groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have continued to expand their influence. And in late April 2026 the military government found itself having to fend off coordinated attacks from separatists and jihadists across the country. The defence minister, General Sadio Camara, was killed.

Foreign interventions over the past decade have often misunderstood what was happening on the ground. Extremist groups have capitalised on issues such as land disputes, corruption, and resource competition to gain legitimacy, often aligning with the community’s tensions. The weakness of state institutions and security forces has allowed groups such as Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) to consolidate power.

These groups have adapted by forming alliances and tailoring their narratives to local grievances, prioritising immediate issues over ideological objectives.

We are political scientists who have researched the security situation in Mali and the Sahel. Our recently published paper showed that non-state armed groups in the Sahel, particularly in Mali, have emerged as key power brokers, shaping local governance by filling gaps left by weak state institutions.

While external actors such as France, the US and Russia have prioritised counter-terrorism and state-building, they often overlook the governance functions of non-state armed groups. These groups often provide essential services and gain local legitimacy.

Recognising the role of armed groups as local power holders does not mean accepting or legitimising their actions. However, ignoring this reality has led to policies that miss the mark. When interventions focus only on military solutions, they risk misunderstanding why people interact with these groups in the first place.

Our findings challenge conventional interventions that focus solely on defeating non-state armed groups or reinstating centralised state control. We argue that security solutions alone are insufficient. We advocate for a more nuanced approach that integrates the potential for non-state armed groups when it comes to governance, legitimacy and local agency. Non-state armed groups have provided governance over territories in countries like Colombia, Syria and South Sudan, among others.

Armed groups as de facto authorities

Armed groups in Mali are not just fighting forces. In many parts of the country, they play a more complex role. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of groups operating within Mali. The largest and best known, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, is a coalition of five organisations and claims to have over 10,000 fighters in the country.

In central and northern Mali, bordering Algeria, the state is often distant, absent or mistrusted. Armed groups step into this vacuum. They settle disputes, enforce rules, collect taxes, and sometimes provide a basic sense of order.

For communities living with daily insecurity, these functions are not abstract; they shape everyday life.

Our study established that this does not necessarily mean the population agrees with these groups or supports their ideology. Many do not. However, when there are few alternatives, people adapt. They follow the rules because they need to survive, not because they believe in them.

This distinction is important. This helps explain why these groups are so difficult to dislodge. Their strength does not come only from weapons but also from how deeply they are embedded in local realities.

Why military strategies fall short

International efforts have largely focused on fighting these groups and rebuilding the authority of the Malian state. Although well intentioned, these kinds of interventions often overlook something essential: what happens to the spaces these groups leave behind?

An example is France’s 2013 intervention. The French army helped the Malian army to regain control of the northern part of the country from advancing Islamists during Operation Serval. The aim was to stop extremist forces from advancing to Bamako. This did not end the conflict. Many fighters moved to rural areas where the state had little presence and built ties with local communities.

In central Mali, where cattle farming is a key source of income, this dynamic contributed to the spread of violence between Fulani and Dogon communities, reinforcing grievances exploited by extremist groups.

Simultaneously, attempts to strengthen state institutions have struggled. In some places, security forces are seen as ineffective and even abusive.

Faced with this reality, people often turn to whoever can offer some level of predictability and protection, even if that actor is an armed group.

External involvement has also become increasingly fragmented. France’s withdrawal, rising anti-western sentiment, and the arrival of Russian-linked forces have created a crowded and sometimes conflicting intervention landscape.

Different actors bring different agendas, and their presence does not always translate into greater security. In some cases, it can even worsen things by reinforcing tensions or weakening trust in already fragile institutions.

Caught in the middle, civilians make difficult choices daily. Their decisions are rarely ideological but rather about survival.

Rethinking the response

We conclude from our findings that a more grounded approach would begin by listening to local realities. It would address the gaps that allow armed groups to take root. This means improving access to justice and security, supporting local institutions, and taking grievances seriously. It also means recognising that legitimacy is built from the ground up, not imposed from above.

Mali’s experience shows that there are clear limits to what military force can achieve on its own. As long as interventions overlook the everyday realities of governance and survival, they are unlikely to bring about lasting change. Until that shift happens, armed groups will remain hard to dislodge, not only because they can fight but also because, in many places, they have become part of how life is organised.

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