Africa
No Ugandan leader has ever lost power in an election since Uganda gained independence in 1962, and the military that decides who’s in charge has become so useful to Western partners that they rarely challenge what it does at home. So how did Uganda become so volatile and militarized, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?
Read MoreIn the year 1900, Africa had about 9.6 million Christians, but today it has around 750m. In many ways, Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted south of the Sahara, where African church leaders are now decisively winning internal fights within the Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist worlds. But why is this happening, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?
Read MoreFor decades, Ghana faced serious political instability. But it has run an unbroken multiparty democracy since 1992, and since 2000 power has changed hands between its two main parties three times, even as many of its neighbors in West Africa face coups and domestic volatility, and despite major economic problems. So how has Ghana managed to stabilize politically, and what impact does this have on its geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreBotswana’s entire economy rests on a single commodity. Diamonds long provided about a third of the government's revenue, and they're still around 80% of its exports, but the collapse of demand for natural diamonds globally has triggered Botswana's worst financial crisis in decades, and perhaps a geopolitical overhaul. So why is Botswana so reliant on the diamond trade, and how is it trying to move on?
Read MoreEswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is a small absolute monarchy that has looked stable for decades, but it's also one of the most externally dependent countries in all of Africa. It's landlocked, surrounded on three sides by South Africa, and without South Africa it would struggle to exist at all. So why has Eswatini managed to stay independent when it needs so much external support?
Read MoreCameroon is often described as a former French colony with a substantial English-speaking minority. But that’s not completely true. It was a German colony before being split between France and Britain. And while the Anglophone divide has produced real conflict, it is a misconception that the fight between English and French speakers is the source of the country's problems. In fact, Cameroon is a country full of misconceptions. So how are Cameroon’s geopolitical dynamics misunderstood?
Read MoreMore shipping tonnage sails under Liberia's flag than any other country's, but only a third of Liberians even have electricity. And when USAID was dismantled in 2025, no country on earth lost more as a share of its national income. For two centuries Liberia has rented itself out: its land, its labor, and even its flag. So why hasn’t this led to long-term prosperity?
Read MoreMadagascar is not a place people know much about. I’d bet money that most people’s only exposure to it is those animated movies from the 2000s, its diverse wildlife, and the vanilla the country produces. But Madagascar faces severe political unrest and natural disasters that increasingly threaten its stability and are arguably far more interesting. So why should we be paying attention to Madagascar?
Read MoreEgypt has been a recognizable geopolitical entity for about 5000 years. You’d think from its geographical position and its history that it would be far more powerful than it is. But Egypt today faces constraints that have made stability very difficult to achieve. So why hasn’t modern Egypt been able to achieve the power Ancient Egypt once had?
Read MoreSouth Africa controls 83% of the world’s platinum, metals your phone and your car can’t work without. It sits on minerals valued at over 2.5 trillion USD, and yet it has the world’s worst inequality, unemployment over 30%, and until recently, it couldn’t even keep the lights on. None of this is bad luck. South Africa was built piece by piece over nearly 400 years. So how does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics today?
Read MoreMalawi is one of the world’s poorest countries. It depends heavily on foreign aid and a colonial-era economy anchored on declining tobacco exports, and it’s wedged between Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique, making it completely dependent on ports in other countries for trade with the rest of the world to occur at all. This also means that it is extremely vulnerable to those countries’ political volatility. So why is Malawi a country at all, and how has it managed to survive?
Read MoreIf you zoom in on West Africa, you might notice that Senegal completely surrounds another country, a tiny sliver of land called The Gambia. This is the smallest country on mainland Africa at just over 11000 square kilometers, but it has over 2.4m people, and its history is fascinating. So why does The Gambia exist in the first place, and what place does it have in geopolitics?
Read MoreSouth Sudan became an independent state in 2011, and since then it has experienced a violent civil war, persistent ethnic violence, and rampant human rights abuses that you might have heard about. But you probably haven’t heard about the fact that South Sudan is collapsing. The 2018 power-sharing agreement between the government and the opposition is falling apart, putting the country on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict. But why?
Read MoreFor about 60 years, Tanzania was one of the most stable and peaceful African countries. But since late 2025, a wave of state violence against protesters has upended the established order. Meanwhile, Tanzania occupies a unique geopolitical position as the ocean gateway for six landlocked states, the terminus of a 1.4b dollar Chinese railway, and the export point for massive oil and gas projects. So why is Tanzania experiencing such dangerous upheaval, and how might this affect its role in geopolitics?
Read MoreThere’s a country in the middle of Africa whose sprawling, jungle-covered territory produces about 73% of the world’s cobalt, without which your phone, your laptop, and your car wouldn’t be able to exist. But the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, has also experienced the deadliest wars ever on African soil. So how are these two facts connected, and what impact does the DRC ultimately have on geopolitics?
Read MoreIf you zoom in on a map of east Africa, you might notice two little countries tucked between Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beyond being surrounded by far larger countries, Rwanda and Burundi also look like a single country that’s been split in half. So why are Rwanda and Burundi small, separate, and surrounded?
Read MoreDid you know that for over 500 years, Spain has technically been an African country? Obviously most of Spain is in Europe, but just like French Guiana makes France a South American country, the territories of Ceuta and Melilla in north Africa give Spain a very different geopolitical footprint than any other state in Europe, and they are a key player in Spain’s heated dynamic with Morocco. So how exactly do Ceuta and Melilla play into geopolitics?
Read MoreIf you’ve heard of Eritrea at all, you’ve probably heard it referred to as the North Korea of Africa. This is a country of a few million people governed for the last 33 years by one man, in a very literal sense. Eritrea has no constitution, no legislature, and no elections, but it is now being courted simultaneously by Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now the US. So what makes this tiny east African autocracy so attractive in the world of geopolitics?
Read MoreYou probably never heard that on Christmas Day 2025, US Tomahawk missiles hit Islamic extremist targets in the state of Sokoto in northwestern Nigeria. These were the first ever direct US missile strikes against Nigeria’s insurgencies, but the more interesting aspect of this is that it’s a symptom of the fact that the Nigerian government doesn’t have oversight of the country’s security. Today, Nigeria relies on many different security architectures that vary in effectiveness from region to region and often barely speak the same language, making coordination difficult at best. So why is Nigeria’s security architecture so scattered?
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