This is going to go down as the dumbest war in the Western Hemisphere since Napoleon III decided that only a Habsburg princeling could save Mexico

You know you're old when you remember watching Vladimir Guerrero Jr's dad play in the minors....

Old: The US might illegally attack Venezuela. New: The US might illegally attack Nigeria.

This is the worst kind of sensationalist narrative. It plays into hands of both jihadists and the junta. There's no evidence for it. Yes the security situation is getting far worse, and Bamako is facing growin gstrains, but JNIM is not on the brink of "taking over" Mali. www.wsj.com/world/africa...

there'd definitely problems with using military/war framings for electoral politics, but one thing it is good at is helping people keep is and ought separate. "The enemy has a strategic advantage that we must fight around" is rarely interpreted as "The enemy is correct and we should lose".

Militarizing Marriage is now OpenAccess! Thanks to Ohio University Press (with the generous support of a Mini-Grant from RSP at WWU) for facilitating the process. Now you can access tirailleurs sénégalais' conjugal relationships across French Empire at the speed of a download.

Looks like fairly credible reports of a serious coup plot foiled in Nigeria. The conventional wisdom has been that coup risks there are lower than rest of region, despite its history. This might have to be revised... www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlin...

Freikorps Federalists

I've been covering Madagascar daily for work, and one consistent worry has been that the military or political class would capture the Gen Z movement. This coup wasn't necessary and will solve none of Madagascar's problems. But good riddance Rajoelina. www.jeuneafrique.com/1730939/poli...

Jesus Christ. How can you moan about "anti-French sentiment" in Africa when you pull off shit like this. www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/2...

They pretend to write, we pretend to grade?

From Jeffrey Paller's wonderful "This Week in Africa" newsletter

It's nice to be quoted by Thomas Deltombe in the @newleftreview.bsky.social on France's memory politics and, in the case of the Duclert Report and Rwanda, how they limit accountability and facilitate closer military ties with a profoundly authoritarian regime. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

If you're looking for (potential) good news in these dark times, look to Madagascar where corrupt autocrat Andry Rajoelina might get overthrown. www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/2...

It's always interesting see when governments mismanage their own election rigging. Gabon's authorities have messed up the recent legislative polls so badly that the public electoral body has had to denounce them. www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/2...

The endgame for all of this is constructing a military that will obey orders when ordered to fire on citizens. That's the throughline to half of what Trump is doing.

We could just write the same about the US right now.

An apt US intelligence analysis of Zaire, March 1979.

Really good piece by @tangibihan.bsky.social challenging reporting in some French media (notably Jeune Afrique) over Mali's internal junta dynamics and alleged tensions. It also illustrates a broader point that analysts should probably take to heart. 1/ www.worldpoliticsreview.com/mali-junta-m...

Possibly the only honest thing the man has ever done. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/u...

I'm finally digging into some of the results of the @fesonline.bsky.social's2025 "Mali Mètre" survey published in May. The results are striking. Eg a large majority see the overall situation of the country as improving:

The French almost certainly weren't involved in coup-plotting here (and it's not even clear there was coup-plotting at all). But, one issue I want to explore one day is the alleged French role in a huge range of African coups from the 1960s onwards. www.jeuneafrique.com/1715667/poli...

i think it is hard for some people to really their heads around the reality that kennedy is staunchly anti-vaccine and thinks that people should suffer through disease and that those who die deserved it and that those who survive are a better order of human being

This article made me ill. It's clear that the Israeli army is massacring Palestinians daily, but to read it in the soldiers' own words...they're just "following orders." "It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Our form of communication is gunfire." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

"Art of the ceasefire: U.S. pretends to obliterate Iran's nuclear sites Iran pretends to retaliate Israel pretends to have won" - @stephenwertheim.bsky.social

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

Good article on the discourse of violence/non-violence and what it obfuscates & (de)legitimises: "the most powerful of the master’s tools is not violence, but delegitimization and division"

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

More important things going on, but I have a new article out in @comppol.bsky.social on how ideology shapes rebels' wartime institutions, carrying over to postvictory statebuilding & governance approaches, w/original evidence from Nicaragua, Liberia, & Uganda www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cuny...

Sometimes fighting back literally means fighting back.

Hey does anyone know what's happened to the journal African Affairs?

if Thunberg is brave enough to repeatedly put herself directly in harm’s way, then journalists can be brave enough to say that a civilian vessel was illegally seized in international waters, and its crew abducted

The failure of top Democrats to denounce these anti-immigrant attacks as human rights violations, as fascist terror - is moral abdication. These are the Whigs who refused to talk about the evils of slavery out of political cravenness.

Perhaps not the brightest of ideas.

“Israel’s balancing act – maintaining starvation while avoiding famine – cannot last indefinitely. Each cycle leaves Gaza’s population weaker.”

This is nuts, but I do think that military history needs more funding.

British surgeon Victoria Rose, who's just returned from Gaza: "They're coming through the doors like a conveyor belt... really small children with massive injuries.. bits of their bodies blown off... every day at least half [of my cases] were under the age of 11.. its barbaric"

During the pandemic, the US implemented the most effective social welfare policies in our history -- programs that worked because they were big enough, simple, and universal. And then we withdrew them. This remains imo the central economic-policy story of our times. davisvanguard.org/2025/05/3hou...

This is about locking African nations out of financial gain from the resources extracted from them. Quietly obscene. www.wsj.com/business/ene...

🚨 Job alert 🚨Join @emorier.bsky.social, @vincentfoucher.bsky.social, @corinnajentzsch.com and me, and be part of a new exciting research project on jihadism in Africa. Two more positions will follow. Feel free to approach @emorier.bsky.social if you have questions. Please circulate widely

At this critical time—today, right now—I hope you’ll join me in donating to those in need of food & the basics of survival, like those served by the Sameer Project. People will die without our help. linktr.ee/thesameerpro...

Dads make diaper changes, but they do not do it as they please; they do not change diapers under self-selected circumstances, but respond to diaper circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Remnants of past feedings weigh like a nightmare on the diapers of the living.

From @ihabhassan.bsky.social (on X). Red are zones marked for evacuation. 2+ m people are supposed to fit into the green zones. It sends shivers down my spine.

Just saw the Andor episode where Senator Mothma described what happened at Ghorman a genocide, and the Senate and Empire tried to cancel her.

"The systematic destruction of residential buildings and public structures has become a central part of the Israeli army’s operations, and in many cases, the primary objective." www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-...

It's great to see top-level media coverage of my awesome wife @guttmannaviva.bsky.social's research on the complicity of European intelligence services in Israeli assassination campaigns in the 1970s. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

How do civil society actors in the Central hashtag#Sahel shape their governments' foreign policies and geopolitics? @lauraberlingozzi.bsky.social and I examine this question with regard to current politics in #Niger and #Burkina Faso. 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....