War, Erasure, And The Politics Of Culture In Sudan

BY LARISSA-DIANA FUHRMANN

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

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

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

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

Mapping the Damage: Tangible and Intangible Losses

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

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

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

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

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

Sudanese-Led Preservation Efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Prioritize Culture: Rationales for Policy Integration

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

BY JEN COLE WRIGHT

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY,

COLLEGE OF CHARLSTON

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

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

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

The disconnect

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality’s balancing act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigating the balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Typical Gig Worker Is Changing – And Struggling More Than Ever To Make Ends Meet

The number of gig workers on public benefits has surged in recent years. AP Photo/John Minchillo

BY JACOB LEDERMAN

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN FLINT

The next time you call an Uber ride or order food delivery with an app, there’s a good chance that the gig worker you meet is getting government benefits.

In 2025, companies such as DoorDash, Lyft and Uber had the most workers receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits among all major employers, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. This marks a major shift from 2020, when an earlier GAO survey found that Walmart and McDonald’s took the top spots for SNAP recipients.

That finding may appear surprising to most Americans, who usually see platform-based work as a side hustle to earn extra cash. In fact, these jobs are becoming more essential as a primary source of income, even as they fail to cover basic food and medical expenses for gig workers.

As a scholar of urban politics, I consider this finding an important part of the broader picture revealed in a survey of more than 1,000 Michigan residents that my institute conducted with the Michigan Metro Area Communities Study.

Roughly 22% of total respondents had engaged in gig work, and about half of those said gig work was essential or important to meeting their basic needs.

At the same time, safety net programs – paid for by taxpayers – are filling the gap when platform companies hire low-wage workers without offering traditional benefits.

Flexibility as a double-edged sword

Major gig-work platforms, including Uber and Lyft, often describe their jobs as an opportunity for workers to earn income on their own terms and hours.

In this respect, they’re right. In our survey, 9 in 10 workers said they valued the flexibility, and more than two-thirds reported positive experiences overall.

But gig workers also named pressing concerns, especially about transparency, pay and benefits.

The issue, then, isn’t whether workers want flexibility, but whether flexibility allows them to get by in today’s economy.

In fact, gig work may be supplemental, but it isn’t always optional. With nearly half of all Americans saying they struggle to make ends meet, gig work is likely to increase as a source of financial survival.

At the same time, these platforms aren’t substituting for traditional employment. We found that relatively few gig workers – only 6% – reduced hours or left another job to pursue other gig work.

And when gig work becomes a necessary source of income, the lack of benefits – from health insurance to disability insurance to workers’ compensation – reflects a shift in who is turning to the safety net. If major platforms won’t pay a living wage or provide adequate benefits on the grounds that it’s the price of “flexibility,” government programs often fill the gap.

In other words, taxpayers are helping foot the bill to compensate gig workers.

Medicaid enrollment surge

The Government Accountability Office report also showed that gig platforms are collectively now the third-biggest U.S. employer with workers on Medicaid, the public health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. By contrast, in 2020 they didn’t make the top five.

What’s more, recent changes to Medicaid are likely to exacerbate conditions for gig workers. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and immigration bill passed in 2025 included provisions for the many states that had expanded Medicaid over the past 15 years. Under the new rules, Medicaid recipients face new and tougher work requirements that demand 80 hours of work or school per month to maintain coverage.

Gig work counts toward the requirement, but gig workers who work for multiple platforms may have trouble proving eligibility. For example, app interfaces have different formats for reporting hours, and gig workers don’t receive a standard pay stub with total hours worked.

They also lack a traditional employer contact or a supervisor who would allow for easy verification. And their total hours worked don’t always account for wait times, while fluctuations in user demand can make income unpredictable.

As is the case for Medicaid recipients more generally, the complexity and paperwork of the new work requirement may deny them coverage, regardless of whether they work 80 hours per month. These extra hurdles are likely to push more Medicaid recipients off the rolls and toward other social programs as medical bills surge and their overall finances become even more strapped.

This loss of coverage may also lead to even more dire consequences, such as increased hospitalizations that can result when uninsured people forgo basic or preventive care.

Is portability the answer?

In some states, lawmakers are starting to address the growing trend of gig platforms using government benefits to outsource benefit costs. Portable benefits offer one promising response.

Under this model, platform companies or users of gig apps contribute to worker-owned benefit accounts that follow workers across platforms. In our survey, 61% of gig workers supported this idea, as did more than half of other kinds of workers.

Two states already provide some important lessons from existing models.

In New York state, the Black Car Fund, initially established for taxi and limo drivers, has covered gig drivers since 2014. It’s a nonprofit, state-authorized benefits fund that’s managed by a board consisting of industry representatives, including drivers.

Enrollment in that program is automatic for all gig workers and taxi drivers, with benefits paid for through a passenger surcharge collected instantly via fares. It made headlines in 2023, when the state secured a US$328 million settlement after Uber and Lyft withheld pay and benefits from workers. That settlement included mandatory paid sick leave, minimum pay and other benefits.

This model has effectively shifted some of the burdens of lower-wage gig work from taxpayers to users. A centralized pool of cash gives the Black Car Fund significant purchasing power, allowing it to offer drivers full workers’ compensation as well as varying levels of health, dental and disability coverage that drivers can chose from.

Platform companies don’t contribute money at present, but if they did, they could make these benefits even more generous.

A different approach in California

As a contrasting example, California shows how much policy design matters.

The state opted to work with tech companies when it crafted Proposition 22, which sought to provide delivery and ride-share drivers limited benefits while preserving their independent contractor status. Passed in 2020, it left implementation to the platform companies and offered a narrower set of benefits that aren’t fully portable across platforms.

The California model also has more barriers toward getting benefits. For example, tech companies only count “engaged hours” toward the minimum required to access benefits, which doesn’t account for time waiting for assignments. And because the system isn’t truly portable, gig workers who work for different platforms have more trouble qualifying.

One study found that only 10% of California drivers are receiving the healthcare stipend that the law established.

The central role of tech platforms in determining who’s eligible has become a flash point, with unions and labor rights groups reporting widespread problems with access and eligibility. In New York, on the other hand, a neutral third party determines eligibility and adjudicates payouts.

While these states have taken different approaches, I believe policymakers should remember that they don’t need to treat flexibility and worker protections as mutually incompatible. In the absence of universal federal benefits for gig workers, local and state officials can find ways to ensure that social costs aren’t shifted to the public through tax dollars and to workers through greater financial insecurity.

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Africa Shaped The Global 2030 Development Agenda. How It Can Influence What Comes Next

African countries need to agree on priorities to avoid accepting choices made elsewhere. Ian Panelo, Pexels

BY HAFTE GEBRESELASSIEGEBRIHET AND DAN BANIK

All United Nations member states adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. They cover poverty, health, education, inequality, climate change, peace and other global issues. The goals are now approaching their 2030 deadline.

The goals matter because they shape national plans, international cooperation and decisions about development funding. The question of what should follow them can no longer be postponed.

The UN has already begun preparing for that discussion. The Pact for the Future invites the High-level Political Forum, under the auspices of the General Assembly, to consider in September 2027 how sustainable development should be advanced by 2030 and beyond.

This gives the African Union and its member states about a year to agree on their priorities and influence the debate before its main ideas are settled.

Will Africa help write it, or simply respond to it?

We study Africa’s leadership in global development debates. A recent study led by Hafte Gebreselassie Gebrihet examines how the Common African Position, a shared set of African priorities for the negotiations that produced the SDGs, influenced the post-2015 development agenda. It shows that Africa has helped shape a global development framework before. In 2014, African governments adopted the common position while negotiations on the goals were still under way. It gave African negotiators a shared set of priorities before the final agreement was reached.

Entering the process with an agreed position gave them more influence. It identified structural transformation, decent work, science and technology, peace and security, environmental sustainability, development finance and more equitable global partnerships as priorities for the continent. Several of these ideas were later reflected in the SDGs.

This mattered because African governments had long been treated more as implementers of global development agendas than as agenda setters. Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s introduced major economic reforms across the continent with limited regard for African priorities. The Millennium Development Goals later focused global attention on poverty, health and education, but offered little space for a coordinated African role in defining the agenda itself.

The Common African Position changed that pattern. It showed that influence begins before leaders arrive at a summit, when priorities are defined, coalitions are built and negotiating language is drafted.

That lesson matters again.

Can the African Union do it again?

The Common African Position was not the product of easy agreement among African governments. It followed two years of political organisation and consultation.

The AU Assembly gave the African Union Commission responsibility for identifying continental priorities with member states and regional economic communities. The assembly also created a committee of ten heads of state and government. Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led it. The committee coordinated African leaders and built support beyond the continent.

Parliamentarians, regional organisations, civil society groups, women and young people, trade unions, academics and businesses contributed to consultations at national, regional and continental levels.

African and UN institutions provided technical support. After the common position was adopted, the AU Assembly told member states to speak with one voice. It also asked the committee to develop a plan for advocacy, negotiation and alliance building.

A similar effort is possible today. Africa still has time to shape the process.

The Addis Ababa Declaration, adopted in April 2026 at the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, calls for active and collective African engagement in shaping the post-2030 framework.

The declaration links the process to African priorities and the AU’s Agenda 2063. It sets out initial ideas for the next framework. It also asks Mauritius to present the declaration and its main messages at the 2027 summit and other international meetings.

But the declaration is a starting point, not a new common position.

Turning it into a formal continental negotiating position will require leadership from heads of state. The African Union Commission must coordinate the process. Governments must also consult widely and agree on priorities.

The next framework will be negotiated under very different conditions. Climate change has intensified. Debt has increased. Aid budgets are shrinking. Competition among global powers is changing international cooperation. New technologies are also creating opportunities and widening inequalities.

Africa’s experience with the Common African Position points to five ways the continent can strengthen its influence when negotiations begin.

Five crucial steps

1. Agree on priorities early

African leaders adopted the common position before the global goals were finalised. They entered the process with a common understanding of their priorities and interests.

The post-2030 framework may sound distant. But the ideas that will shape it are already being discussed. By the time governments enter formal negotiations, many of the main proposals will have been developed, debated and revised.

African governments should begin that work now, before the main choices are made.

2. Speak with one voice

The African Union has 55 member states. They have different political systems, economies and development priorities. Complete agreement is neither realistic nor necessary. But the 2014 experience showed that African countries can gain influence by agreeing on their main priorities.

A coordinated position gives negotiators greater leverage than dozens of separate national interventions. It also shows that certain concerns are continental rather than national.

This will matter in debates over climate finance, debt restructuring, access to technology and reform of international institutions.

3. Align the post-2030 agenda with Agenda 2063

Africa does not need to invent a new vision for itself every time the international community develops a new framework. It already has one.

Agenda 2063 sets out the African Union’s long-term aspirations for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful continent driven by its own citizens.

Building on Agenda 2063 would give the African position both continuity and political credibility.

The task is to ensure that the next global framework reflects priorities Africa has already chosen.

4. Focus on a limited number of strategic priorities

A long list of demands would weaken Africa’s negotiating position. A future common position should not include every challenge facing the continent. It should focus on issues where African countries have urgent needs and shared interests.

The priorities should include development finance, climate adaptation, debt sustainability, technological capacity and reform of global institutions.

A shorter list would help African negotiators defend each priority more consistently. It would also make it easier to build alliances and keep attention on the issues that matter most.

5. Move from reacting to agenda-setting

Africa’s influence increased when it helped define the debate rather than reacting to proposals developed elsewhere.

For decades, African countries have often been portrayed as recipients of development agendas designed by others. The Common African Position challenged that assumption. It showed that African governments can shape international priorities when they enter the process early, coordinate their positions and connect their concerns to wider global debates.

Before the 2027 SDG Summit, the African Union and its member states should agree on a concise post-2030 position rooted in Agenda 2063. Otherwise, Africa risks returning to a familiar role: accepting choices that were made elsewhere.

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Young Nigerian Women Want To Go Into Politics – Party Rules And Older Men Keep Them Out

Women and young people are grossly underrepresented in Nigeria’s politics. Fatima Yusuf/Pexels

BY OMOMAYOWA OLAWALE ABATI

SENIOR RESEARCH OFFICER,

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Nigerians will return to the polls in 2027. Campaigns will commence, crowds will fill the streets for party rallies, but the most consequential decisions about the elections are already happening. They are taking place in party offices, at the homes of powerful political godfathers, and in selection processes that most Nigerians never attend and sometimes don’t hear about.

This is where the most vulnerable group, young women, lose. Nearly half of Nigeria’s population is female and more than 70% is younger than 30 years. Yet women and young people continue to be grossly underrepresented in the country’s politics. Nationally, 6.7% of elected positions and appointments are occupied by women. The global average is 22.5% and Africa’s is 23.4%.

Those who want to contest for elective offices signify their interest at their wards, where they must secure support before going to the local governments or senatorial zones or states. This depends on the offices they want to vie for.

Two changes have been made in the past 10 years to address the underrepresentation of women and young people. The first was the 2018 Age Reduction Law, also known as Not Too Young to Run. It lowered the minimum candidacy age to 25 for State Houses of Assembly and the House of Representatives. Then in 2022 the country’s two dominant parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), announced fee waivers for women and a 50% discount for young aspirants. These are fees paid to political parties to purchase nomination forms.

But these changes have failed to shift the dial. Only two young women (aged under 30) won seats across Nigeria’s 36 state assemblies in the 2023 elections. Women aged between 30 and 35 managed to secure three seats in 2019 and 2023 state assembly elections. At the national level, the youngest women are in their 40s.

Our initial research as political scientists found that dominant political parties nominate only a few young (male and female) candidates. Minor parties field the highest numbers of young candidates.

In follow-up research, we studied the reason for this: examining how formal rules and informal norms of parties interact to shape the political candidacy of young women in Nigeria.

The research included 40 interviews with party leaders and candidates in the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party. We asked candidates about party selection practices and the roles of gatekeepers, money and godfathers, and how they navigate the party selection process. We asked party leaders about their statutory and non-statutory roles in selecting party candidates and what they perceived of young party aspirants.

What we found

We found that in Nigeria’s two dominant political parties, young women aspirants face a range of age- and gender-biased challenges.

These play out in:

visits to party elders, who are mostly elderly men, who hold the reins of power in these parties. While these visits are not obligatory, they are necessary in Nigeria to secure the support of the party elders

ancestral-lineage scrutiny, where the right of married young women to contest for political offices in their father’s and husband’s state of origin is questioned by senior male party members

“godfather networks” – sponsors of candidates, usually those with money to finance campaigns

financial barriers, where aspirants are not only expected to be up-to-date in payment of membership dues but are required to sponsor party events.

Our findings show that gender and youth disadvantage are reinforced through informal practices of parties. Our findings also expose why quotas or fee waivers can’t fix a system where the real gate-keeping happens in the shadows of internal party politics.

What’s not changed

Nigeria’s new Electoral Act 2026 abolished indirect primaries. This was a delegate convention system that gave party elites their most reliable tool for controlling outcomes. Previously, aspirants were informally expected to have sponsored delegates into party positions years in advance. Such positions are party offices at the ward, local government and state levels. These delegates will then vote during the indirect primaries.

One young male aspirant in Kwara told us he had facilitated key delegates’ emergence in 2015, “so in 2019, when the time came to lobby them, it was effortless”. No young woman we interviewed had built the same network. That particular mechanism is now unlawful.

With Section 87(2) also requiring that failed consensus on candidates’ selections must revert to direct primaries, not back-room elite bargaining, the law has narrowed some space for manipulation. The consensus option is where there are no primaries and candidates emerge by affirmation.

But three critical gaps remain.

First, Section 86 removes the detailed statutory procedures that previously governed direct primaries, including ward-level voting, equal opportunity for aspirants, and participation of all registered members, replacing them with a requirement that primaries follow “party guidelines”. The parties that have consistently excluded young women are now writing the rules of their own primaries.

Second, the 2026 Electoral Act introduces no cap on party nomination fees. The APC’s state assembly nomination form, which cost 2 million naira (US$1,465) in 2023, then a 135% increase from 2019, now costs 6 million naira (US$4,396), a 200% increase from the last election. This is not an electoral cost. It is a filter. The new law leaves it entirely unregulated.

Third, Sections 83(5) and (6) bar courts from hearing internal party matters. It means young women can’t challenge unlawful exclusion.

Moving forward

Other gaps remain ahead of 2027 elections:

a statutory cap on nomination fees, enforced by the Independent National Electoral Commission

enforceable youth-gender quotas at the candidate selection stage.

This would compel major parties to field young women in competitive seats, not merely posts under affirmative action.

These reforms would reduce the need for young politicians to solicit the support of powerful men. The question is whether the political will exists to change the rules.

Under-representation is not a supply problem. The evidence from 2023 shows young Nigerian women with political ambition came forward in large numbers. The bottleneck is demand, and what parties choose to do with them once they arrive.

Mayowa Adeniji contributed to the research on which this article is based.

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How A Network 0f Pink-Slime News Sites And Conservative Activists Went After Campus DEI

Using FOIA requests and hidden-camera videos, the groups targeted universities, leading to the firing of faculty and staff.

BY MIRANDA GREEN

In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.”

The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”

An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found that these efforts were bankrolled in part by donations from conservative philanthropists and foundations that have received funding from the Koch family. Charles Koch and his late brother, David, poured hundreds of millions into nonprofits and libertarian think tanks that promote education reform, among other things. “It is a fundamental attack on how academic ideas are created,” Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford and the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said. “Those ideas that get produced outside of interference are the ones that the billionaires, the donors, the right-wing political infrastructure are deeply and existentially threatened by.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy proposal that has become a lodestar of Trump administration policy, labeled higher education an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” As President Trump has called for an end to “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs, conservative groups have leveraged thousands of public records to publish articles and videos designed to shame institutions, professors, and students. The tactics have led to upheaval across public universities and to faculty terminations, and are part of a broader push to limit what can be taught at institutions of higher education. As of the end of 2025, more than half of college and university students lived in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. And the use of FOIA requests to extract information about course materials is triggering a widespread reexamination of what is considered a public record and what constitutes academic freedom.

“The sense of a kind of creeping right-wing net, in which they’re going to catch so-called left-wing faculty who are ‘indoctrinating their students,’ is widespread,” Joan Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose research focused on gender and academic freedom, told Tow. “And it has a chilling effect, which is the point.”

Last July, a national organization requested all syllabuses for seventy-four courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that included terms such as “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” “queer,” and “sexuality.” The requester was the Oversight Project, whose mission is to “expose and root out corruption in government, among elected officials, and in our most influential organizations.” The group claims to have filed more than a hundred thousand FOIA requests and nearly a hundred lawsuits since its start, in 2022.

“These things being syllabi, they should be transparently posted on the internet without us having to do it, and so we’re really the forcing function for that,” Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, told Tow. “Give it to the people of America so they can see for themselves as to whether schools are still teaching corrosive DEI concepts, and if it’s unlawful in any way.”

Howell has sent dozens of FOIA requests to various government agencies on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and another of its spin-offs, the Daily Signal, a conservative news website. In July, Howell and the Oversight Project sued the Department of Homeland Security in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking public records about the total number of “illegal aliens removed by the Department” and all voluntary departure data.

At UNC Chapel Hill, the Oversight Project’s request suggested that continuing to teach classes whose written materials contained words such as “sexuality,” “queer,” or “intersectionality” was against the law under executive orders Trump issued in the first days of his second term. “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with current Executive Orders,” Howell wrote in the request. He added that releasing the materials would “shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance.”

Though presidential executive orders are not laws, the UNC system had already directed the sixteen universities it oversees to stop requiring course credits related to DEI. (The system also issued waivers that allowed courses with titles such as “Feminist Theory” and “Social Work Policy and Restorative Justice” to continue being required for some majors.) Professors worried, however, that publicly releasing their syllabuses could lead to targeting by online groups and potential doxing. They started a petition to keep syllabuses private, arguing that publishing course materials “would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.”

“The FOIA stuff is yet another way of getting faculty into trouble at various universities and creating an atmosphere in which people are then afraid to teach,” Scott said. “The point is to not only go after individuals, as they’re doing in North Carolina right now. The point is to make an example of a few people so that the rest of us will comply.”

In July of 2025, UNC Chapel Hill sided with professors and denied the Oversight Project’s request. “Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments, and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer and are owned by the preparer as nontraditional work,” the university told Inside Higher Education at the time.

Efforts to use federal and state FOIA laws to “expose” university professors and administrators have been underway for decades, according to Zach Greenberg, the director of faculty legal defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit that works to protect freedom of speech on college campuses. “We’ve seen a lot of this occur in the 2010s targeting professors, usually from advocacy groups on specific issues. For example, you would have oil companies target environmentalists for their scholarly records at universities,” Greenberg said. “Some of it is to figure out what exactly is being taught at these universities, and others are just retaliatory and burdensome because of the nature of their request.”

Recently, though, the requests have grown more personal, Margaret Kwoka, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the author of Saving the Freedom of Information Act, said. “One thing we’re starting to see at the state level is a proliferation of what I think are being characterized as abusive or harassing requests that are more politically motivated,” Kwoka told Tow. Deciding what is legitimate and what is burdensome can be tricky, she said: “One person’s view of what is harassing is actually another person’s view of oversight.”

At the same time that North Carolina’s public universities were under pressure to provide class syllabuses, colleges across the country were receiving similar records requests from Metric Media. Metric operates nearly twelve hundred conservative-leaning local news sites, and has posted favorable articles in exchange for payment. In February of 2025, several local news sites owned by Metric sent the simultaneous FOIA requests to administrators at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Illinois, seeking emails and statements that included terms such as “Indigenous” and “Diversity.” But it didn’t end there.

That May, the same month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the US would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, Metric outlets started asking for detailed information about Chinese students and the departments in which they studied. In 2025, they sent at least four hundred and forty-seven records requests to universities from Florida to Alaska, asking universities to explain how they were monitoring students “to safeguard intellectual property and confidential information.” The papers also sought information about students’ ties to the China Scholarship Council. The organization funds Chinese citizens to study abroad in the US, and a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party had been pressuring colleges to cut ties with it.

Then, last summer and fall, according to a Tow analysis of Metric’s requests, Metric news sites sent universities across the US nearly a thousand requests for “course syllabi,” “university board member information,” and “college employee compensation data.” One of Metric’s founders, a former journalist named Brian Timpone, described the records requests as an attempt to hold higher-education institutions accountable. “Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children,” he told Sampan, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper that covers New England, last October. “When a parent has to send their child to a university many states away, rather than the state university for which they are paying, they should know the reason. They should know that hundreds of thousands of spots once reserved for in-state students are now given to foreign nationals who aren’t exceptional at all. It’s a complete outrage.”

Kentucky’s Murray State University was among the schools that received Metric’s requests. Timpone told its student newspaper last September that Metric wanted to find out whether state-funded colleges “are actually teaching, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.” Timpone did not respond to Tow’s request for comment.

University responses to Metric’s FOIAs were varied. Murray State, for example, provided Metric with Chinese student admission numbers for the 2024–25 school year, but said it had no records on how many scholarships they received, where the scholarships came from, or policies for monitoring students, the university confirmed to Tow. Southern Illinois University outright denied a request from the Carbondale Reporter, a Metric outlet, to release course syllabuses, stating that Illinois’s records laws exempt “course and research materials used by university faculty.” A University of Connecticut official told Metric that the school couldn’t legally release information about the departments where each student studied because doing so could identify them. But according to a June 27, 2025, response the university shared with Tow, it offered to provide Metric with information about which colleges the students attended. Stephanie Reitz, UConn’s director of media relations, said Metric representatives didn’t respond to the offer.

Blanket requests such as the ones filed by Metric have become easier thanks to software advances and the availability of AI. Between January of 2025 and January of 2026, according to Tow’s analysis, Metric filed more than nine thousand FOIA requests across all fifty states. Timpone has disputed that number, telling Tow: “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” According to the analysis, at least a quarter of those requests—twenty-two hundred and eighty-six—sought records about universities.

The mass filings have strained the agencies and departments charged with responding to requests. The backlog can make it impossible for other requesters, such as journalists and private individuals, to get public records from the same agencies. The Heritage Foundation has boasted about this impact, suggesting that gumming up the system is part of its goal. “Our team has been so effective at flooding government agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that government workers were complaining that ‘the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job,’” the Heritage Foundation wrote in its 2024 annual report. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Tow.

Mass FOIA filings can be deemed “vexatious,” a legal term that can allow agencies to refuse to answer them. The deluge of record requests has sparked discussion over whether the current FOIA system is broken, but some public records activists worry that any changes would further limit records access for everyone. Instead, they are advocating for new technology. “I think the government needs to do a better job pushing out information,” Kwoka, the Ohio State law professor, said. “And I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make a big difference in how many requests have to be made every year. Some key investments in technology and personnel would make a really big difference, and yet we just haven’t seen the political will to invest in those sorts of system improvements.”

The Oversight Project and Metric Media are just two of at least four groups backed by conservative donors that have targeted university professors over DEI policies and related teaching materials in the past eighteen months. Accuracy in Media, which describes itself as “a nonprofit that uses investigative journalism and cultural activism to expose corruption,” has released dozens of hidden-camera clips of interactions with professors and university staff who appear undeterred by laws or school policies limiting teaching about equity and inclusive philosophies. And the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that trains young conservative journalists, produces the College Fix, a news site whose coverage has been shared by right-wing outlets, including the Daily Caller and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Together, Metric Media, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association received more than fourteen million dollars for their 2024 operations, according to their most recently released 990 tax filings. That year, the Oversight Project was still part of the Heritage Foundation, which made more than a hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue. The Oversight Project’s 2025 tax filings have not yet been made public.

Metric, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association are registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are forbidden under federal tax law from engaging in election-related political activity. But these groups and the Oversight Project share the same handful of conservative backers, including Donors Trust, which Mother Jones described in 2013 as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” According to the groups’ 2024 tax filings, Donors Trust gave a total of 398,263 dollars to Accuracy in Media and the Student Free Press Association, and 734,673 dollars to the Heritage Foundation, which, at the time, controlled the Oversight Project. Donors Trust had given 1.27 million to Metric Media in 2020.

The Heritage Foundation, which has received more than 1.3 million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation, was another overlapping donor. In 2024, according to tax filings, it gave a hundred thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association as part of an “Innovation Prize.” In 2024, the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund advancing conservative ideas, whose president previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, gave 32,200 dollars to Heritage and forty thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association. “These people are saying, ‘We don’t like the ideas that are produced through scholarship. We like these other ideas that support our hierarchies, support our version of what the family should be,’” Kamola, the Trinity political science professor and author of Academic Freedom and Dark Money Donors, told Tow.

Kamola said that conservative groups intensified their focus on higher education after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, when they worried that calls for academic reform would necessitate federal intervention to enforce more equitable hiring practices and possibly even reparations. “If there is an argument that says states have a role in addressing systemic issues, then that’s a problem for those with these radical libertarian beliefs,” he told Tow, adding that, as a result, conservative groups have moved to “delegitimize” colleges and universities. “You create these controversies, so then the school is weak, and you can make it easier for your provocateur to come to campus, or for your Koch-funded academic center [to be built] in the name of viewpoint diversity.”

The power of such groups has grown during Trump’s second term. The author of Project 2025’s section on the Department of Education is Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s education policy director. In the document, she argued that the government should stop investing in “the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism.” She added: “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

Most of the groups that target university professors rely on the internet to spread their message. They often focus on a specific subject that has gained traction online, amplifying one another’s stories and videos through reshares and rewrites. After the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last fall, for example, right-wing activists combed educators’ social media accounts for negative comments about Kirk and posted teachers’ identities in an online “watchlist.” As a result, the American Association of University Professors told Tow that at least forty professors were terminated, suspended, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned.

Scott, the professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, said that though targeting academic institutions is not new, “the Trump administration has given them the opportunity to do it with a vengeance.” Greenberg, of FIRE, said the internet mob creates an “outrage machine” that chills free expression by making faculty think twice about what they say—and what they teach.

“Seeing senior colleagues being punished for speaking out, I can see why professors would self-censor accordingly,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them having thin skin. I think it’s a matter of institutions lacking the backbone and the principle to defend professors when people call for them to be punished for their expression.”

In 2024, Bethany Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, published a research paper about marriage and family dynamics. Conservative outlets the College Fix, the Washington Examiner, and Fox News quickly ran articles and a TV segment blasting Letiecq for criticizing what Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, called the “two-parent married family model.”

The negative coverage sparked death threats, including a phone call Letiecq said she received. (Letiecq reported the call to local police, who issued an arrest warrant for the caller.) George Mason, meanwhile, was about to face a controversy of its own. In June, Glenn Youngkin, who was then the governor of Virginia, appointed Kenneth Marcus to the university’s Board of Visitors, a policymaking and oversight committee. Marcus had previously served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which, in 2023, had named George Mason as one of dozens of universities under investigation for supposed Civil Rights Act violations related to “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”

When he was appointed to George Mason’s board, Marcus told the Jerusalem News Syndicate, “I’ve been proud to support Governor Youngkin’s recent work combating anti-Semitism here in Virginia, including his leadership in legislation adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.”

Letiecq and two colleagues wrote about Marcus’s political connections in an August 2024 op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed. Later that month, Letiecq was the subject of a blog post published by the nonprofit Defending Education under the headline “George Mason University (CorruptED).” The post targeted a course Letiecq taught and included a copy of her syllabus. According to tax filings, in 2024, Defending Education received nearly a million dollars from Donors Trust and five hundred thousand dollars from the Bradley Impact Fund.

“My syllabi ended up on the Defending Education website. I was like, ‘What is this about?’” Letiecq said. She had never heard of the group, but when Letiecq looked at its tax filings, she found a familiar name: Defending Education’s treasurer was listed as Kenneth Marcus.

“I feel like I was being retaliated against,” Letiecq said. She said she complained to the university. Democrats in the Virginia Senate ultimately blocked Marcus’s appointment to the board. Months later, Defending Education’s president, Nicole Neely, sent FOIA requests to George Mason seeking emails between the university and Letiecq that mentioned Marcus. Letiecq said she has not received notice from the university about whether her correspondence was released. Marcus did not respond to a request for comment.

“Back in the old days, we used to put all of our syllabi up [online] because that could facilitate students’ academic journey,” Letiecq said. Now, she said, doing so makes faculty feel like “sitting ducks and targets of this insanity.”

Educators caught in secretly recorded videos have experienced some of the worst professional consequences. Last spring, Accuracy in Media began posting to its YouTube channel selectively edited videos of university staff and professors talking about navigating DEI bans at their universities.

In “BUSTED: UWF Administrator Exposes Scheme to Evade Florida DEI Ban,” Aurora Osborn, an administrator at the University of West Florida and the director of the school’s Office of Campus Culture and Access, talks about using private funding to pay for diversity initiatives. “State funds cannot be used to be spent on certain programs that promote DEI, but there are other funds involved in running a university, for example donations,” Osborn says in the video.

Accuracy in Media has since posted nearly fifty other gotcha-style video investigations of professors and administrators at universities in states including Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Alabama. According to Inside Higher Ed, at least three university employees captured in the films were later removed from their positions. This past June, the Department of Justice announced it was starting a Title VI investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at Arizona State University following “recent viral videos” that it said showed the school had “denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin.” The DOJ didn’t offer specifics about the videos or link to them, but Accuracy in Media took credit. The organization pointed to a series it posted online that targeted Arizona State University professors and administrators.

Accuracy in Media declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Tow. “Accuracy in Media’s team of talented, dedicated investigative journalists are focused on determining whether highly paid university administrators are adhering to the law,” Adam Guillette, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “No taxpayer should be forced to pay the salaries of lawbreakers. The hateful, radical activism promoted by many of these employees is divisive and antithetical to the founding principles of our nation. We’re always excited when law enforcement agencies at the state or federal levels take action based on our journalism but we rarely communicate with them.”

A similar undercover video recorded inside a Texas A&M classroom last fall targeted Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in English, who taught a course on children’s literature. The video was recorded during a September session on gender identity and expression, when a student interrupted McCoul’s lecture and said that she wasn’t “entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.” The student appeared to be referring to a January 2025 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” She also said that the lecture contradicted her own religious beliefs. The secret recording was amplified on X by Texas state representative Brian Harrison, who helped it go viral and called for McCoul’s firing.

Texas Scorecard, a local outlet run by the nonprofit Citizens News Guild, covered the story extensively. CNG’s chairman is Timothy Dunn, a Texas oil-and-gas magnate who has donated heavily to conservative and family values causes, as well as to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Ultimately, McCoul, two Texas A&M staff, and the university’s president—a retired four-star Air Force general—would lose their jobs over the video. In February, McCoul sued the school and several administrators for wrongful termination, accusing them of violating her academic freedom. “The subject matter that the student, and then the university, found problematic was germane to her lesson, consistent with the syllabus, the course description and the catalog description,” her lawyer wrote in a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

The Texas A&M saga depicted a “worst-case scenario” that is playing out over and over, FIRE’s Greenberg said. “Those groups contact the university or create a big media firestorm calling for the professors to be punished and terminated for their research. And universities do that. They take the bait, they accede to the pressure, they cave to the mob, and they punish their professors.”

Since 2000, nearly seventeen hundred scholars have faced sanctions for their speech. Of that number, according to a FIRE report released last October, about three hundred were terminated or forced to resign. The American Association of University Professors has offered recommendations to schools on how best to respond to FOIA requests. Its primary suggestion is that university legal counsel and faculty should work together to determine what they do and don’t need to release under FOIA law. “It has become really clear that this isn’t just a citizen who is interested in what’s going on in my class, right? These are partisan hacks who want to score political points by misrepresenting what takes place in my class,” Kamola said. “I think the institutions have an obligation to defend their faculty from that partisan interference.”

Universities can push back against requests, but they may be unwilling to engage in legal battles. “A lot of schools are saying, ‘We’re just going to keep our heads down and hope that we don’t get noticed, and we’ll just ride this one out,’” Kamola said. “It’s a bad strategy. It’s a losing strategy.”

Reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that since 2023, nineteen states have passed laws that prohibit colleges from having DEI offices, ban mandatory diversity training, forbid universities from using diversity statements in hiring or promotion, or block colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions and employment. A study by PEN America this year found that thirty-eight universities have been proposed for suspension from federal research partnerships over DEI hiring practices. In 2009, Texas became the first state to implement legislation mandating that college syllabuses be shared publicly; since 2024, Utah, Indiana, and Ohio have passed similar laws. University systems in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida have also implemented requirements for syllabuses to be made public.

The Oversight Project is on track to expand its public records campaign. It plans to send FOIA requests to all public universities, seeking any syllabuses that mention DEI policies, as well as university data on their Chinese students, as part of the organization’s “fifty-state solution,” Howell told Tow. He said he couldn’t say how many FOIA responses the organization has received so far, but that it intends to publish them “as soon as practical,” adding: “It’s not imminent. We don’t know what we got yet.” He said the Oversight Project also plans to fundraise for future legal battles. “I think there’s going to be a lot of patriots across the country and foundations that want to support such efforts,” Howell said. “It could be in the tens of millions if all goes well.”

In December, the UNC system announced that instead of rejecting FOIA requests for syllabuses on the basis that they constitute intellectual property, it would now consider syllabuses “directed works,” making them subject to FOIA. It was a total reversal. The president of the UNC system, Peter Hans, said the new policy aims to “promote transparency amid scrutiny.”

A month later, the UNC public records office reopened the Oversight Project’s previously denied request seeking any syllabus that contained DEI-related terms, including “critical race theory” and “microaggressions.” The school notified the relevant professors that their syllabuses were being relinquished.

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How An 1876 Massacre Of Black Men In South Carolina Turned Racial Terror Into Political Power

Abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white mobs often justified lynchings as a response to riots, to Black voting and to alleged crimes against white women. Library of Congress/Getty Images

 

BY JACOB WARE

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF DOMESTIC

TERRORISM, GEORGETOWN UNIERSITY

As the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, its citizens commemorate a democracy more diverse, free and inclusive than it’s ever been. The path to this milestone was imperfect and paved in blood and suffering. Still, few of the revelers will likely pay heed to the anniversary of another historic event: the 150th anniversary of the July 1876 Hamburg massacre.

The massacre, which took place in Hamburg, South Carolina, began as a dispute between a local Black militia and two white citizens over whether the latter could cross the group’s centennial Fourth of July parade. The militia leader, Doc Adams, was later charged with blocking a public highway.

At his court hearing, Adams was met with a white militia – part of the white supremacist Red Shirts – which then pursued the Black militia on their retreat to their weapons arsenal. After a firefight, the Red Shirts captured several Black militiamen, marched them to a nearby site and executed at least four people.

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Union veteran Daniel Henry Chamberlain, described the event as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.” Yet no one was convicted after the attack. In fact, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders would instead rise to the highest offices in the state.

Corey Rogers, an organizer of the 150th anniversary Hamburg commemoration, recently called this massacre “the seminal event that began to change the trajectory of African Americans.” The repression and inequality that would define the next 100 years of U.S. history, in other words, was born at Hamburg.

As a scholar of domestic terrorism, I study the long history of white supremacist and far-right violence in the U.S. My research shows that the Hamburg massacre was not just characteristic of a broader violent moment, but also that the echoes of such violence ring loudly today.

From Hamburg, across the South

According to one estimate, the 12 years of the Reconstruction era, during which the Union attempted to construct a racially diverse democracy in the wake of the Civil War, saw over 2,000 Black citizens murdered in “racial terror lynchings.” Another estimate, from 1895, more starkly claimed that as many as 53,000 Black Americans had been murdered in the 30 years following the Civil War.

By intimidating Black voters and galvanizing white Democrats who sought to undo the results of the Civil War, this violence served to effectively kill Reconstruction and the tangible promises of Black emancipation.

What happened in Hamburg provides a particularly egregious example of such racial terrorism catapulting political triumph. After that tragedy, several of the Red Shirts ringleaders went on to successful political careers, with two of them becoming U.S. senators – one of whom, Benjamin Tillman, also served as South Carolina governor.

As Jenny Heckel, then a Clemson University graduate student, noted in her 2016 master’s thesis, it was “not in spite of the white Carolinians’ participation in the murder of six black men, but because of it, they won election to political offices.”

In South Carolina’s 1876 gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Confederate veteran Wade Hampton III, emerged triumphant and reinstated white supremacy as the fulcrum of state governance. His name had been put forward by former Confederate major general Matthew Butler, who had represented the two white farmers before the Hamburg attack and who himself went on to serve in the U.S. Senate.

In 1895, South Carolina held a constitutional convention, spearheaded by the aforementioned Hamburg massacre ringleader Tillman, and adopted a new constitution that effectively ended the Black vote in the state.

An enduring threat

In the 1890s, renowned abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass said white vigilantes offered three justifications for the lynchings of Black Americans: stamping out alleged race riots, protecting the white vote share and protecting white women from alleged sexual crimes by Black men.

The first two were front and center in the Hamburg massacre. In fact, as Heckel reflected a decade ago, “white Carolinians blamed the black militia for starting the riot, and Southern white newspapers created images of riotous blacks to contest black descriptions.”

Since the massacre, racial violence has had a long echo in the United States. And in many cases, the same justifications elucidated by Douglass remain.

Both the Tulsa race massacre and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, for instance, were sparked by false accusations of sexual harassment or assault made against young Black men.

The violence persists today. In June 2015, just 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Hamburg, a white supremacist gunman entered the historically Black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

In May 2022, a white supremacist killed 10 Black Americans at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.

Both gunmen made multiple references to the same conspiracy theories Douglass identified, with the Charleston domestic terrorist going as far as to praise segregation as “a defensive measure” while criticizing the “historical lies, exaggerations and myths” of the historical record of slavery and its aftermath.

Still, there are key differences between the attacks at Charleston and Buffalo and their Reconstruction predecessors. The political violence that tainted the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era clashes with traditional definitions of terrorism, which typically targets a power structure that such violence seeks to upend.

Instead, attacks like the one in Hamburg, which sought to proactively protect the rights and power of white Americans – and which were often endorsed by state and local governments – have more in common with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not only did the scale of the broader violence across the South indicate a campaign to mass-murder an ethnic subgroup for political purposes, but Tillman, perhaps the most infamous of the Hamburg murderers, never denied the attack’s goals.

“We are not sorry for it,” he would proudly recall before the U.S. Senate in 1900. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”

‘A painful duty’

Attempting to commemorate all such anniversaries is an impossible task, simply because of the sheer volume. For example, September marks the 150th anniversary of the Ellenton Riot. In that massacre, Black South Carolinians were systematically hunted throughout their community over an alleged attack on a white elderly woman, which was later proved false. The death toll may have eclipsed 100.

Countless similar incidents have plagued U.S. history.

In my view, to tell the story of America’s founding without referencing these profound scars is akin to deceit, if not complicity. Civil rights leader and journalist Ida B. Wells put it this way in 1895: “It becomes a painful duty … to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.”

Or, as a local retired pastor said of Hamburg commemorations, “We want to keep it burning so people won’t forget what transpired.”

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