There is nothing wrong with nationalism when it is simply a celebration of a country’s best values, traditions, and history. But politicians in Europe and the United States need to be careful that the populist nativism they are stoking does not morph into more violent forms of identity politics, as it has in Christchurch and Sri Lanka. I first visited Sri Lanka as Britain’s development minister in the 1980s, during the early stages of the vicious war between guerrilla fighters – the so-called Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – and Sri Lanka’s armed forces. This bloody ethnic conflict, pitting…

Even chronic optimists know by now that Nigeria is in a state of complete war with herself. The only difference is that, unlike other wars with known and identifiable enemies, those who roll artillery tanks against the people of Nigeria are at best unidentifiable and at worst, being shawled in ethnic, religious and political shroud. While the two and half years Biafran War, Nigeria’s most grueling example of a needless intra-national war, cost her about 100,000 military casualties overall and between 500,000 and 2 million civilians recorded to have starved to death, not minding the 700 felled by the bullets…

Governor Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna State, who rarely shies away from controversy or misses an opportunity to showcase his courage, recently, took a very bold step of abrogating the indigene-setter dichotomy in his state. Announcing the abrogation of the dichotomy in his official twitter handle on April 11, 2019, the Governor said: “In Kaduna State, the Indigene/Settler dichotomy has been abolished. Every person resident in Kaduna State would be accorded all rights as citizens and indigenes of the state. Kaduna State Resident Registration Agency will create a reliable database of all residents in the state, with a view to…

Despite ever-improving conditions for millions of people around the world – documented by entities like the University of Oxford’s Our World in Dataand highlightedby scholars like Steven Pinker– popular discontent is on the rise in many places. The reason is simple: whereas the first trend is being driven by low- and middle-income countries, the second is concentrated in high-income countries. Throughout the developed world, conditions for many workers are deteriorating, with no recovery in sight. Income inequality is near historic highs, wealth inequality is even higher, and economic insecurity is widespread. As the United Kingdom tears itself apart politically and…