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colonialism
From Revolution to Reparations: Black August and Haiti’s Ongoing Struggle for Freedom
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation.
Aug 30, 2025
As we mark Black August, the struggle that launched the global fight for Black liberation—the Haitian Revolution—remains unfinished. Over 200 years after enslaved Haitians lit the first beacon of Black resistance in August 1791 and set a precedent for abolition by winning their freedom, they are fighting the next chapter in the struggle for Black economic and political liberation—one that could set another precedent, this time for reparative justice.
On August 22, 1791, Haitians revolted against their French enslavers, liberating themselves and forming the world’s first free Black Republic, and the first country to abolish enslavement. The Haitian Revolution was not just a simple victory against one of the world’s most powerful empires. It was a global rupture, proof that Black freedom was possible and European domination was not inevitable. It lit the fire of revolution globally, inspiring enslaved and colonized people worldwide. As Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s leading advocates for Black rights in the United States, said in his speech to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, “[in] striking for their freedom, [Haitians]... struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”
France and other enslaving countries realized the power of the Haitian Revolution as a herald of global Black liberation and a threat to their supremacy. They sought to punish Haiti for the crime of being Black and free. In 1825, France sent a fleet of 14 warships equipped with 528 canons to Port-au-Prince and demanded that Haiti pay 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of what they considered their “property,” including captive Haitians. In exchange for this payment, France would recognize Haiti’s independence—an independence already paid for by the blood and lives of the Haitians who fought Napoleon’s army and won.
The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804.
Under threat of attack and re-enslavement, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer and his allies agreed to pay. The ransom—and subsequent extortionate loans by French banks to finance payments—crushed Haiti’s economy, prevented it from investing in its own development, and left it vulnerable to foreign intervention and exploitation that further impoverished and destabilized the country. Many of the conditions used to paint Haiti as a “failed state” today can be traced directly to that original grave injustice.
The Independence Ransom and other measures delayed broader liberation, but the promise of Black freedom and autonomy that Haiti gave the world remained alive. In his speech, Douglass called Haiti “the Black man’s country, now forever”—and Haitians are still fighting for their freedom and inspiring others. These are the struggles we honor during Black August, born in the 1970s in California’s prison system to commemorate the lives and assassinations of revolutionary brothers Jonathan and George Jackson: the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in August 1831; the March on Washington on August 28, 1963; and every uprising that has dared to defy enslavement and racial capitalism.
This August, Haiti stands at the heart of another urgent struggle: the fight for restitution for the Independence Ransom. Calls for France to pay restitution have increased in recent years, not just from Haitians but from all around the world. The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804. In fact, when the United States and its powerful allies realized the power of Haiti’s claim to balance the global economy in 2004, they overthrew Haiti’s democracy rather than risk its claim succeeding.
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation. Restitution would not only address the grave injustice done to Haiti, it would also lay a powerful legal and political foundation for broader reparations. Just as Haitians won their freedom in 1804, they will eventually win restitution for themselves and unlock the door to reparations for all. But that victory will require sustained pressure—on France, the United States, and the banks and companies that facilitated and profited off this economic extraction—not just from Haitians, but from all people who wish to honor the memories of those who paid the ultimate price in the fight for liberation. This means support for restitution, but also for a democratic, sovereign government that will assert the claim and otherwise be accountable to the Haitian people.
This Black August is not just a commemoration, it is a call to action. It is a call to join the 60-plus leading organizations from Haiti, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and beyond that sent a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding restitution and reparations. And it is, above all, a call to remember Haitians’ pivotal role in the global Black struggle for liberation and to recommit ourselves to the unfinished work they started in 1791.
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TICAD in Yokohama: Reflecting on the Real Meaning of Development in Africa
The record in Mozambique shows that projects backed by public finance can harm communities and the environment unless local voices guide the process.
Aug 21, 2025
The ninth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, or TICAD, opened August 20 in Yokohama, organized by the Japanese government with the United Nations, UN Development Program, World Bank, and African Union Commission. Japan, as host, aims to promote “high quality” development in Africa by applying lessons from Asia. Three decades since TICAD’s launch in 1993, interest in Africa remains strong—and so does the need to reflect on what “development” truly means.
Japan’s record in Mozambique offers sobering lessons.
Before we can discuss “development” we must recognize that many of Africa’s deep crises today are rooted in the continued exploitation of its people and resources, shaped by inherited colonial structures. Public funding and transnational corporations play a large role in perpetuating these patterns.
The Mozambique liquefied natural gas (LNG) project illustrates the problem. Led by French energy giant TotalEnergies, it is one of Africa’s largest gas extraction projects, with Japan as its top financier. The publicly funded Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) has committed up to $3.5 billion in loans, while Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) has agreed to provide $2 billion in insurance.
As leaders gather at TICAD to shape Africa’s future, we urge Japan and all participating governments and businesses to focus on the needs and aspirations of African people themselves.
JBIC justifies this support by citing growing global LNG demand, particularly in developing countries, rising environmental awareness, and Japan’s energy security. Yet revenue flows to a United Arab Emirates-based special purpose entity—enabling gas and mining companies to avoid paying an estimated $717 million to $1.48 billion in taxes to Mozambique. The country is further disadvantaged by the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system, which prioritizes loss compensation for investors.
On the ground, grievances remain unresolved. More than eight communities have been affected, and many families still await promised compensation. Others have lost farmland or access to the sea, undermining agriculture and fisheries livelihoods. Local residents report that consultation meetings often involve military presence, stifling open discussion.
Since 2017, the region has suffered violent insurgency, which halted the project in 2021 and brought heavy militarization focused on protecting gas infrastructure. Insurgent activity has surged again in recent weeks, amid signs of project restart. In March 2025, analysts warned that the sense of disenfranchisement created by the project could fuel insurgent recruitment.
Environmental and climate risks are also high. Independent reviews find that the project’s environmental impact assessment understates potential harm, including lacking a rigorous biodiversity baseline study for the deep-sea environment.
This pattern—external actors driving their own agendas rather than responding to locally defined and articulated priorities—is not unique.
A decade earlier, Japan’s own ProSAVANA project in northern Mozambique followed a similar path. Launched in the early 2010s by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) with Mozambican and Brazilian partners, it aimed to convert land to agricultural use, particularly soybean cultivation for export to Japan. Modeled on Brazil’s Cerrado “green revolution” of the 1970s, it was promoted as a way to promote agricultural and economic development in Mozambique.
In reality, the project facilitated land grabs covering 14 million hectares in the Nacala Corridor, displacing small farmers. Civil society groups denounced the opaque consultation process and backed local farmers’ resistance. After years of protest, the Japanese government ended its involvement in July 2020, belatedly acknowledging these concerns.
Both Mozambique LNG and ProSAVANA demonstrate how “development” promoted from the Global North can harm communities and the environment. When public finance is involved, the risks—and the responsibility—are even greater.
Better outcomes require meaningful, transparent consultation with affected communities, robust due diligence, and genuine accountability. Without these, development risks becoming extraction by another name.
As leaders gather at TICAD to shape Africa’s future, we urge Japan and all participating governments and businesses to focus on the needs and aspirations of African people themselves, and to avoid—or even redress—the mistakes of the past.
The question remains as urgent as ever: Who is this development really for?
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When Water Becomes War: The Moral Failure of Global Governance in the Middle East
Global powers that once justified their interventions in the Middle East with rhetoric about human rights remain silent when basic rights are violated through the denial of water.
Aug 21, 2025
The Middle East today is witnessing a transformation that goes far beyond conventional geopolitics or the competition for oil. One of the most urgent yet underexplored dimensions of its crisis is the question of water, which has increasingly become both a scarce commodity and a weapon in the hands of states and non-state actors alike.
According to the Pacific Institute, in 2022 and 2023 alone there were roughly 350 conflicts worldwide linked directly to water, and the Middle East—particularly Palestine—accounted for a disproportionate share of these incidents. This reality is not accidental. It reflects the way global climate change intersects with regional inequalities, colonial structures, and authoritarian governance to create a cycle of violence where access to water itself becomes a matter of survival, control, and domination.
For decades, international observers focused on energy as the main axis of power in the Middle East. But as climate patterns shift, it is water that increasingly defines the possibilities of stability or conflict. Israel’s control over Palestinian aquifers and its systematic restriction of water access in Gaza and the West Bank is a striking example of how resource management is turned into an instrument of collective punishment. For Palestinians, the denial of water is not simply a matter of inconvenience; it is a violation of their most basic human right, used deliberately to weaken their social fabric and impose dependency. In this sense, water becomes no different from a siege or a blockade: It is a tool of war under another name.
The instrumentalization of water is not confined to Palestine. In Iraq and Syria, dams on the Tigris and Euphrates have repeatedly been manipulated by regional powers and armed groups to gain leverage over civilian populations. The deliberate flooding or drying of entire areas has been used both as a tactical weapon and as a form of coercion against communities already devastated by decades of war and sanctions. In North Africa, the tensions between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan over the Grand Renaissance Dam reveal how water disputes are reshaping the geopolitics of the Nile basin. These examples highlight a pattern that is not unique to one country but characteristic of the entire region: Water is increasingly governed not as a shared resource but as an instrument of power, deployed in ways that exacerbate fragility and deepen mistrust.
If water continues to be treated as a weapon, the region will face not only deeper wars but also the erosion of any possibility of trust among its peoples.
Overlaying these conflicts is the accelerating impact of climate change. The Middle East is warming faster than many other regions, and prolonged droughts are already destabilizing entire societies. In Syria, a decade of severe drought preceding the outbreak of civil war played a major role in driving rural populations toward cities, where state neglect and economic desperation created fertile ground for unrest. In Iran, recurring protests over water shortages reveal how ecological stress translates directly into political instability. In Yemen, the depletion of groundwater has compounded the devastation of war and famine, pushing communities into cycles of displacement and despair. These are not isolated events; they are symptoms of a systemic crisis in which the environment is no longer a neutral background but an active driver of conflict.
From the perspective of the Global South, the crisis of water in the Middle East cannot be separated from broader patterns of structural inequality in the international system. Just as natural resources such as oil or minerals have long been subjected to forms of colonial extraction, water too has been folded into systems of control shaped by external powers and neoliberal institutions. Privatization schemes, often promoted by global financial institutions, commodify access to water and place it in the hands of corporate actors whose logic of profit directly contradicts the principle of universal human rights. For vulnerable populations in Gaza, Basra, or Sana’a, the question is not merely ecological but profoundly political: Who controls the flow of life itself?
The human cost of these dynamics is staggering. Water scarcity strikes hardest at the most vulnerable—children, women, refugees, and the poor—who bear the brunt of disease, malnutrition, and displacement. When families must choose between buying water or food, the very notion of human dignity is stripped away. In refugee camps across the region, inadequate water supply is linked to rising health crises, while urban populations face soaring prices as corporations exploit scarcity. To speak of water in the Middle East is therefore to speak of justice, of whose lives are considered expendable in a system that treats water as a weapon rather than as a shared right.
At the same time, the weaponization of water reveals a profound moral failure of the international community. Global powers that once justified their interventions in the Middle East with rhetoric about human rights remain silent when basic rights are violated through the denial of water. This silence reflects a double standard in which ecological violence is normalized when it serves geopolitical interests. It also underscores how little regard is given to the voices of the Global South, where communities consistently insist that climate justice cannot be divorced from political justice. To demand fair access to water is to demand a reordering of priorities that places human survival above strategic advantage.
The irony of the current moment is that while the West proclaims its commitment to universal values, it is in fact the countries of the Global South that articulate a more compelling vision of planetary justice. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, movements have emerged insisting that water is a commons, inseparable from human dignity and beyond the logic of commodification. This resonates deeply in the Middle East, where communities understand that peace cannot be built on pipelines of oil or weapons, but only on the guarantee that every person can drink, irrigate, and live without fear of thirst. Such a vision requires not only local cooperation but also a radical shift in global governance, one that dismantles the structures of environmental colonialism and affirms water as a fundamental right.
The Middle East stands today at a crossroads where climate change, conflict, and inequality converge. If water continues to be treated as a weapon, the region will face not only deeper wars but also the erosion of any possibility of trust among its peoples. Yet the very urgency of this crisis also opens a space for a new discourse, one that reframes water not as an object of control but as a foundation for coexistence. To imagine such a future is not naïve; it is the only realistic response to a world where climate shocks are intensifying and old paradigms of power are collapsing.
For those of us in the Global South, the lesson is clear: The struggle for justice in the 21st century is inseparable from the struggle for water. To defend the right to water is to defend the possibility of peace, dignity, and life itself.
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