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The Conference That Split Africa and Legalized the Theft
A clock ticked somewhere behind velvet drapes in Berlin, but it did not measure African time. It measured European convenience.
Picture the scene not as a tableau of moustaches and medals—the caricature history textbooks sometimes offer—but as an office of empire disguised as diplomacy. The air would have carried the faint, metallic scent of coal smoke. Boots would have left winter grit on parquet floors. And on the table: maps so crisp they looked newly invented, as if a continent could be rendered legible by ink alone. The men who gathered in 1884–1885 did not need to raise their voices. Their power was quiet, procedural. The most consequential violence came in a tone you might use to discuss rail schedules.
This is the first betrayal of the Berlin Conference: it is remembered as a conference, when it was really a technology. Not merely a meeting, but a method—how to turn domination into administration, how to translate appetite into paperwork, how to make theft wear the neutral face of “order.”
Africa was not in the room. Yet Africa was everywhere in that room: as territory to be allocated, as labor to be harnessed, as “future” to be engineered. The language of the era—civilization, commerce, humanitarianism—did not simply accompany conquest. It anesthetized it. It trained Europe to believe that reorganizing other people’s lives was a moral duty.
And that is why the sentence you began with lands like an accusation that refuses to die: Western countries deeply know they owe Africa a remorseful apology and restitution, but instead they are focused on social engineering. The point is not only that the West did harm. The point is that the West keeps choosing the same posture: managing Africa’s outcomes—its borders, its labor, its movement—rather than relinquishing control in a way that would make real restitution possible.
If you want a devastating truth, here is one that does not require exaggeration: the balkanization of Africa was not a mistake. It was a design.
The partition as a way of thinking
The Berlin Conference did not draw every border by hand—many lines hardened later through bilateral treaties and colonial campaigns—but it legitimized the underlying logic: Africa could be divided into governable units without reference to Africans’ political orders, trading geographies, spiritual ecologies, or kinship architectures. It treated the continent as a surface on which European competition could be made “rational.” That is the trick: Europe’s internal problem—how to prevent imperial rivalry from turning into European war—was solved by exporting chaos outward.
Fragmentation was not only territorial. It was administrative. Once you fracture sovereignty, you can govern by wedges: appoint intermediaries, codify differences, elevate certain groups as “natural leaders,” and then later feign surprise when those manufactured hierarchies produce conflict. This is what social engineering looks like when it wears the garments of policy: it creates conditions, then blames the conditioned.
The more you study colonial governance, the more you see that balkanization is not merely a cartographic event but a psychological one. It teaches a colonizer’s mind to prefer simple categories over complex realities. And it teaches the colonized that the state is an extraction machine, not a social contract—an inheritance that still shapes institutions long after flags change.
This continuity matters because the West often wants history to remain historical: a sealed vault of regrettable deeds. But scholarship on reparations is increasingly blunt that colonialism is not “then.” It is a set of structures—racial, legal, economic—whose effects have accumulated and compounded (Achiume, 2025; Ratner, 2025). The harm was not only the initial dispossession; it was the long architecture of unequal development that followed, and the global regimes—trade, finance, migration—that stabilized those inequalities.
When people hear “reparations,” some imagine a check with an awkward memo line: Sorry for the past. Serious reparative arguments are not asking for that kind of sentimental transaction. They are asking for structural transformation—reparations as a rebalancing of power, not merely a payment (Achiume, 2025). That is precisely what Western governments resist. They prefer the aesthetics of remorse without the surrender of control.
So instead of restitution that changes who holds the pen, we often get social engineering that changes who may cross the door.
Read also: Nigeria 2027: Tinubu, IReV “Glitches” & The Trap Exposed
From the conference table to the consular desk
Empires used to control Africans by controlling African land. Now, more subtly, they control Africans by controlling African movement.
Modern borders are rarely dramatic in the way people imagine. The violence is mostly clerical. It happens through forms, queues, appointments, background checks, “processing times.” It is the kind of power that makes itself invisible by becoming routine.
A consular system can delay a life without ever acknowledging that it has touched a life. A “technical glitch” sounds like an inconvenience—an IT hiccup in an otherwise neutral machine. But neutrality is the luxury of those who are not trapped inside the machine.
When a major embassy system shifts dates because of a technical disruption, the headline can feel almost quaint. Yet the consequences are not quaint to the applicant whose future sits inside a calendar slot. That is not a metaphor. It is reported, briskly, as news: Technical Glitch: US Embassy Plans New Visa Interview Dates. A doctoral program that requires arrival by a certain week does not pause its semester because an appointment system misbehaved. A job offer does not remain open indefinitely because a visa interview was rescheduled into the indefinite future. Families do not suspend grief because an airline ticket cannot be used without the right stamp in a passport.
That is why the seemingly small story carries an enormous moral weight: it reveals how easily modern Western states can turn waiting into a condition for certain populations. Waiting becomes governance. A person’s life becomes a pending file.
And then the rationale mutates. The border does not only claim to be technical; it claims to be moral. It becomes a tool for disciplining entire populations by associating them with risk narratives. A new visa restriction policy is announced with the language of enforcement—“drugs,” “networks,” “associates”—a vocabulary that sounds targeted while often operating expansively: US Announces New Visa Restriction Policy Against Drugs. The logic is familiar: guilt spreads outward like ink in water. It becomes guilt by proximity, suspicion by nationality, penalty by association.
If you want to see the ghost of Berlin, look at how easily whole peoples become categories of concernTo perceive the specter of Berlin, an apparition less of stone and memory than of a chilling ideological current, one must observe the frightening facility with which entire populations are systematically reduced to mere categories of concern. This reduction is the essential prelude to dehumanization, a bureaucratic abstraction that substitutes the rich, and complexities of human individuality for a neat, manageable set of labels—”foreigner,” “dissident,” “undesirable,” or “security risk.” The very genius of this specter lies in its ability to transform millions of unique lives into homogenous data points, making the subsequent application of restrictive policies, surveillance, or even outright expulsion not an act of moral violence, but a cold, logical necessity of statecraft. It is in this frictionless administrative process, this efficient mechanism of labeling and sorting, that the true, terrifying ghost of historical authoritarianism finds its contemporary dwelling.. In the nineteenth century, it was “civilization” and “commerce.” In the twenty-first, it is “security” and “public safety.” The content changes; the form persists: a moral story that authorizes control.
The pattern escalates, as patterns do. Restrictions widen, legal pathways narrow, status becomes more precarious. A report describes expanded restrictions affecting Nigerians, including suspensions that touch even the dreams that were supposed to be rewarded—permanent residency, citizenship aspirations: US Expands Restrictions, Suspends Green Card, Citizenship For Nigerians. Again, the tone is administrative. The effect is existential. Belonging becomes conditional. Even “integration” becomes something that can be paused like a service.
And across the Atlantic, another lever: a European state links visas to deportation cooperation, making the movement of ordinary people contingent on their government’s compliance with removal demands: UK Restricts DR Congo Visas Over Migrant Returns. This is not only border policy; it is geopolitical discipline. It tells a country: your students, your nurses, your business travelers—your people—are bargaining chips.
Read more: Onitsha At Boiling Point: Paths To Peace And Prosperity—Epilogue
Finally, the blunt instrument: processing suspended for dozens of countries, Nigeria among them: US Suspends Visa Processing For 75 Countries, Nigeria Affected. It is hard to read such a headline and not feel the old imperial reflex beneath it—the presumption that the West may interrupt the life plans of millions and call it “review.”
This is what it is truly meant by social engineering. Not always grand, not always overt. But persistent: shaping African futures through Western permissions.The Subtlety of Social Engineering in Shaping African Futures
This is what is truly meant by social engineering when discussing the dynamics of power and influence in contemporary Africa. It is not always a grand, dramatic conspiracy, nor is it always overt, easily identifiable manipulation. Rather, it is a persistent, systemic, and often quiet process.
The West’s preferred form of “reckoning”: controlled repentance
When Western leaders acknowledge colonial harm, they often do it the way an institution issues a public apology: carefully, strategically, with an eye toward liability. The apology is shaped to be morally pleasing while legally thin.
This is not cynicism; it is an observable pattern.
Consider the debate over Germany and Namibia. The moral fact—that German colonial forces committed genocide against the Herero and Nama—is not the main dispute. The dispute is what follows: what responsibility demands, how it should be named, and whether reparative measures should be structured as obligation or benevolence. Critics have argued that the “reconciliation” framework can function as a containment strategy—recognition without full legal accountability, payments without the logic of reparations, development packages framed in a way that preserves donor control (Melber, 2022; Melber, 2024). The choreography is a lesson in how former colonial powers attempt to administer the terms of redress.
This is where reparations scholarship becomes a moral scalpel. It presses a simple question into the diplomatic performance: Who controls the remedy? If the injurer controls the form of repair, repair begins to resemble reputation management.
Legal debates also reveal the West’s tendency to hide behind doctrine. Traditional international law’s focus on state responsibility and temporal limits can be invoked to say: too long ago, too complex, too difficult to assign. But serious legal and moral arguments insist that colonialism’s intergenerational structures should not become an alibi for inaction (Ratner, 2025). In other words: when harm is structural and enduring, insisting on narrow legal frames is not neutrality. It is a choice—a choice that protects the powerful.
Achiume’s interventions push further, arguing that reparations discourse must grapple with race and the ways global inequality has been built and maintained through racialized international order (Achiume, 2025). That is not abstract theory. It is a description of how the modern world was arranged—and how it still functions.
And perhaps nowhere is the West’s controlled repentance more visible than in museum restitution. The return of looted African objects has become one of the most publicly digestible forms of “decolonization.” It allows Western institutions to perform moral progress: ceremonies, speeches, handovers, the satisfying optics of giving back.
Yet the restitution debate is often structured to preserve institutional authority even in surrender. Research on partial norm implementation in restitution contexts shows how states and institutions can comply selectively, returning some items while keeping control over process, framing, and sometimes the very meaning of what is being returned (Boehme, 2025). The question becomes: are objects returned as a recognition of wrong, or as a curated act of generosity?
Scholarly writing on the Benin Bronzes in particular forces the issue. The Bronzes are not simply “artworks.” They are evidence—of a living polity violently invaded, of objects taken in punitive expeditions, of history translated into trophy. Work examining their legacies in the Black Atlantic underscores that restitution is not merely about property but about memory, dignity, and the right to narrate one’s own past (Pugh, 2025). And the idea of “necrography”—reading the objects as inscribed with death, not just beauty—makes it harder for museums to hide behind aesthetics (Figueiredo, 2025). A looted object is not neutral. It is a story about whose suffering could be converted into someone else’s culture.
This is why Western restitution sometimes feels like a carefully measured drip rather than a turning of the tap. The West returns what it can bear to return—what does not threaten its deeper privileges—while leaving intact the larger structures that colonialism built.
Balkanization was not merely lines: it was a manufactured future
To say the West “balkanized Africa” is accurate, but the phrase can risk sounding like a geography lesson. The deeper point is that the partition built a particular kind of future.
Borders cut across trade routes and pastoralist corridors, disrupting economic and ecological rhythms that had been adaptive for centuries. Colonial administration often privileged extraction—cash crops, mining, forced labor systems—over indigenous development priorities. In many places, “indirect rule” converted flexible social identities into hardened categories because an administrator needed clear boxes to govern. Those boxes, once institutionalized, do not disappear when independence arrives. They become the furniture of the postcolonial state.
This is why it is not enough to say colonization caused harm; it is more accurate to say colonization created constraints. It set parameters on what kind of state could exist, what kind of economy could form, what kind of political conflict would be incentivized. And then, with astonishing audacity, Western commentary often treated African instability as evidence of African incapacity rather than as a predictable consequence of imposed structures.
There is a particular cruelty to that rhetorical move. It is like breaking someone’s leg and later criticizing their limp.
This is also why reparations cannot be reduced to symbolic apologies. If balkanization created constraints, then repair must involve loosening constraints. That could mean supporting regional integration without controlling it; restructuring global financial arrangements that punish African states for the very vulnerabilities colonial extraction created; returning cultural heritage in ways that restore narrative sovereignty; and, crucially, dismantling discriminatory mobility regimes that make opportunity conditional on Western permission.
But instead, we see a different impulse: tighten the gates, manage the flows, “partner” on deportations, and punish through visa policy. The same old presumption that African lives are variables in a Western equation.
The modern border as the new conference table
Here is a hard truth many Western democracies are not prepared to face: the border has become one of the primary sites where liberal states practice illiberal power. It is where human rights become negotiable, where due process becomes discretionary, where entire categories of people can be treated as risks rather than as individuals.
This is why visa policy matters in a discussion about 1884–1885. Because it reveals continuity not of identical institutions but of identical assumptions.
The Berlin Conference assumed Europe could reorder Africa without Africa. Modern visa regimes assume Western states can reorder African movement without African consent. In both cases, Africa is acted upon.
And the techniques rhyme.
- In Berlin, legitimacy came from procedure: signatures, protocols, minutes.
- Today, legitimacy comes from policy language: vetting, security, integrity, technical systems.
- In Berlin, the violence was disguised as coordination.
- Today, the violence is disguised as administration.
The narratives uncovered in The Eastern Updates serve not as exhaustive, grand theoretical treatises on global power, but rather as highly instructive, real-time records of its tangible exercise. These stories bypass abstract analysis in favor of concrete examples, revealing the mechanisms and consequences of policy decisions as they ripple through the lives of individuals.The Mechanism of Interruption: Visa Policy as an Instrument of Power
The collected articles illustrate the heterogeneous nature of these power dynamics, spanning from technical accidents to deliberate political maneuvers:
- A Glitch that Rearranges Futures:The mundane reality of a system failure can have profound, life-altering consequences. The report on the “Technical Glitch: US Embassy Plans New Visa Interview Dates” highlights how a simple malfunction possesses the power to unilaterally disrupt travel, education, and career plans, effectively demonstrating that even bureaucratic error can function as an exercise of control, delaying or entirely rerouting individual futures.
- A Restriction Framed as Moral Policing:Policy can be deliberately crafted to achieve political goals under the guise of ethical concern. The announcement of the “US Announces New Visa Restriction Policy Against Drugs” is a clear instance where a purported moral imperative—combating drug use—is leveraged to introduce a new layer of control and selectivity into the immigration process, tightening the net under the banner of public safety.
- A Tightening that Reaches into Permanent Status:The scope of restrictions is not limited to temporary travel but can extend into the very foundation of permanent residency and citizenship. The article, “US Expands Restrictions, Suspends Green Card, Citizenship For Nigerians,” is particularly significant. It demonstrates the willingness of a state to escalate policy beyond temporary measures, reaching into the core legal mechanisms of immigration to affect long-term status, thereby creating a profound sense of uncertainty and vulnerability for established communities.
- A Visa Used as Diplomatic Cudgel:The visa becomes a direct tool in international relations, wielded as a form of diplomatic leverage or sanction. The report, “UK Restricts DR Congo Visas Over Migrant Returns,” shows this policy weaponization in action. Here, visa policy is instrumentalized to exert pressure on another sovereign nation, linking immigration access to compliance with unrelated diplomatic demands, turning the act of travel approval into a direct foreign policy bargaining chip.
- A Sweeping Suspension that Normalizes Interruption:Finally, the power to suddenly and broadly halt processing represents the ultimate, normalized interruption of international mobility. The story, “US Suspends Visa Processing For 75 Countries, Nigeria Affected,” reveals the staggering scale at which a state can execute a policy of mass exclusion. Such an action doesn’t merely restrict; it fundamentally redefines the global landscape of travel and aspiration, demonstrating a unilateral authority to pause the movement of entire populations and normalize such large-scale administrative interruption as a routine facet of international governance.
The grand narrative of international relations, particularly concerning migration and global movement, is rarely shaped by sweeping, abstract legislation. Instead, it is meticulously woven from the cumulative effect of discrete, real-time decisions, as often chronicled by regional news outlets. These reports move far beyond theoretical critique; they serve as critical, unfiltered case studies, providing a direct view of how state power—specifically the authority to grant or deny access—is actually put into operation and experienced by individuals.
What true restitution would require—and why the West resists it
Restitution, taken seriously, is terrifying to the West for a simple reason: it implies that the West is not the natural manager of the world. It implies that those who were acted upon have the right to set terms. It implies surrender—of artifacts, of narrative authority, of economic arrangements, of mobility control.
In the reparations literature, one recurring tension is whether reparations will remain bounded by conventional legal responsibility or be imagined as a broader project of justice that responds to historical and structural wrongs (Ratner, 2025). The West tends to prefer the bounded version. It is manageable. It is insurable. It can be turned into policy without transforming power relations.
But a more serious reckoning insists that colonialism’s legacy is woven into modern global order, and that remedy must therefore be correspondingly ambitious (Achiume, 2025). This is where Western rhetoric often collapses. The West likes the moral glow of recognition; it dislikes the redistribution of authority that recognition logically demands.
Even restitution of cultural heritage, which should be the “easy” part, becomes contentious when it threatens institutional prestige and national mythmaking. Studies show that implementation can be partial and political, shaped by domestic incentives and international optics (Boehme, 2025). The objects become bargaining chips in moral diplomacy. The West wants credit for returning them; it wants to keep control over the story of their return.
The Benin Bronzes are again instructive. Their restitution forces a confrontation not just with theft but with the worldview that made theft feel lawful. The scholarship that traces their legacies insists that what is at stake is not merely ownership but the repair of historical violence and the re-centering of African cultural sovereignty (Pugh, 2025; Figueiredo, 2025). Returning bronzes without returning authority is, in a sense, returning bodies without returning breath.
And yet, Western power keeps repeating the pattern: contain the moral demand within a framework that preserves Western control. That is why restitution can happen while border regimes harden. The West can give back what it can afford to give back—objects, statements, selective acknowledgments—while keeping the deeper levers: finance, trade rules, and mobility.
A final image: ink, then algorithms
Berlin was ink. The modern border is an algorithm. The ethics are uncannily similar.
In 1884–1885, lines were drawn that would later be defended with guns, administered with taxes, and narrated as inevitable. In the present, invisible lines are drawn in databases—risk scores, eligibility rules, nationality-based presumptions—that determine who may move, who must wait, who is suspicious by default. The machinery has changed. The posture has not.
This is why the Western world’s posture toward Africa can feel, to many, like a long insult dressed up as concern. The West claims to want stability, yet it helped manufacture instability through partition and extraction. It claims to want “orderly migration,” yet it polices movement in ways that reproduce hierarchy. It claims to honor universal values, yet it suspends processing, restricts visas, and disciplines states through their people’s mobility.
The time has come for a candid and uncompromising confrontation with historical reality, a truth that the West must finally acknowledge. That undeniable truth is the relentless, systemic exploitation and brutalization of Africa, a relationship defined by centuries of plunder. This was not a passive interaction; it was a ruthless campaign that stripped the continent of its human capital, vast mineral wealth, and cultural heritage, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing through the era of colonial domination. The damage inflicted by this legacy is not merely historical; it is a current reality. The colonial structures—designed to extract resources and suppress native development—were replaced by neo-colonial mechanisms that perpetuate the dependence and hemorrhage of wealth. Through unfair trade agreements, debt traps, manipulation of commodity prices, and the support of corrupt governance, the wealth transfer from Africa to the West continues to this day, a form of economic theft that undermines genuine self-determination and development.
Therefore, the imperative is to refuse the West its preferred and most convenient defense: forgetfulness. The deliberate amnesia surrounding these crimes against humanity is a continuation of the oppression. A genuine reckoning requires more than symbolic apologies; it demands a full acknowledgment of the enduring economic and social consequences of these actions. It necessitates a commitment to reparative justice, structural reform in global institutions, and an end to the ongoing exploitation that allows this historical injustice to be conveniently forgotten. The truth must serve as the foundation for a fundamentally new and equitable global paradigm.
The West balkanized Africa and then spent a century asking Africa to behave as though those fragments were natural. It extracted wealth and then treated African poverty as a local failure. It looted cultural heritage and then curated it as “world culture.” It imposed borders and then criminalized movement across the world it had remade. It engineered conditions and then moralized about outcomes.
And when calls for apology and restitution arise—when the historical record is too loud to ignore—the West often reaches for management tools rather than moral surrender: the press release instead of liability, the committee instead of transfer, the “partnership” that keeps decision-making in Western hands, the visa regime that converts human aspiration into a controllable flow.
If the Berlin Conference taught the West anything, it taught that you can rearrange other people’s lives without hearing their voices—so long as you maintain the fiction that procedure is morality.The moment has arrived for us to face a difficult and unvarnished truth about history—a truth the Western world can no longer afford to ignore. That undeniable reality is the relentless, systematic abuse and exploitation of Africa, a relationship that has, for centuries, been defined by theft. This wasn’t a casual interaction; it was a ruthless, intentional campaign that robbed the continent of its people, its immense mineral wealth, and its priceless cultural heritage, starting with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing right through the violence of colonial rule.
The scars left by this history aren’t just relics of the past; they are felt every single day. The old colonial structures—designed purely to extract resources and choke off local development—have simply been replaced by new, “neo-colonial” systems. These modern mechanisms ensure that Africa remains dependent and that its wealth continues to bleed out. Through deliberately unfair trade rules, crippling debt burdens, the manipulation of commodity prices, and the cynical support of corrupt leaders, the transfer of wealth from Africa to the West persists. This ongoing economic theft is what truly prevents self-determination and genuine development.
Therefore, we have a clear, moral imperative: we must refuse to grant the West its preferred and most convenient defense, which is simple forgetfulness. The deliberate silence and collective amnesia surrounding these crimes against humanity are not an accident; they are an active continuation of the oppression. A true and honest reckoning requires so much more than empty, symbolic apologies. It demands a full, heartfelt admission of the lasting economic and social damage these actions have caused. It calls for a real commitment to reparative justice, fundamental structural reform within global institutions, and an immediate end to the current forms of exploitation that allow this historical injustice to be so easily swept under the rug. The truth must serve as the only foundation for building a fundamentally new and truly equitable global paradigm.
The West first carved up Africa into fractured pieces and then, for a century, demanded that Africa behave as if those arbitrary lines were natural borders. It stripped the continent of its wealth and then had the audacity to treat African poverty as a local, internal failure. It stole priceless cultural artifacts and then showcased them as “world culture.” It imposed borders across the globe and then criminalized the movement of people across the very world it had rearranged. It engineered the conditions for disaster and then stood back to moralize about the resulting outcomes.
And when demands for apology and restitution finally surface—when the historical record becomes too loud to ignore—the West consistently reaches for managerial tools instead of moral surrender: a carefully worded press release in place of real liability, a committee instead of a tangible transfer of wealth, a “partnership” that keeps all decision-making power firmly in Western hands, a visa regime that converts human desperation and aspiration into a mere trickle to be controlled.
If the infamous Berlin Conference taught the West anything, it taught the powerful that they could rearrange the lives of other people without ever having to hear their voices—as long as they maintain the convenient and cruel fiction that following a procedure is the same thing as being moral.
What would it look like to break that fiction?
It would look like reparations that are not confined to symbolism, but that redistribute authority and resources in ways commensurate with historical extraction (Achiume, 2025; Ratner, 2025). It would look like restitution that returns not only objects but narrative power (Pugh, 2025; Figueiredo, 2025). It would look like ending the quiet cruelty of mobility regimes that make Africans perpetually provisional—always processed, always screened, always delayed, always one “glitch” away from having their futures postponed.
It would look like the West is finally doing the one thing it has avoided since Berlin: stepping back from the table it built, and allowing Africans to write—not as “stakeholders,” not as “partners,” but as authors of their own world.
Until then, the chandelier light in Berlin still falls where it always has: on paper, on policy, on the neat surfaces where power loves to pretend it is clean.
Professor MarkAnthony Ujunwa Nze is an internationally acclaimed investigative journalist, public intellectual, and global governance analyst whose work shapes contemporary thinking at the intersection of health and social care management, media, law, and policy. Renowned for his incisive commentary and structural insight, he brings rigorous scholarship to questions of justice, power, and institutional integrity.
Based in New York, he serves as a full tenured professor and Academic Director at the New York Center for Advanced Research (NYCAR), where he leads high-impact research in governance innovation, strategic leadership, and geopolitical risk. He also oversees NYCAR’s free Health & Social Care professional certification programs, accessible worldwide at:
https://www.newyorkresearch.org/professional-certification/
Professor Nze remains a defining voice in advancing ethical leadership and democratic accountability across global systems.
Selected Sources (APA 7th Edition)
Achiume, E. T. (2025). Race, reparations, and international law. American Journal of International Law, 119(3), 397–422.
Boehme, F. (2025). Restitution of colonial heritage collections: Partial norm implementation in Belgium and the United Kingdom. Review of International Studies, 51(Special Issue 6), 973–992.
Figueiredo, J. (2025). A “necrography” of the Benin bronzes owned by the Lisbon Geographic Society (Portugal) and the Dundo Museum (Angola). Heritage & Society. Advance online publication.
Korvensyrjä, A. (2025). The “Borders of Berlin”: West African protests and the coloniality of Euro-African deportation cooperation. Geoforum, 161,
Melber, H. (2022). Germany and reparations: The reconciliation agreement with Namibia. The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 111(4), 475–488.
Melber, H. (2024). Colonialism, genocide and reparations: The German-Namibian case. Development and Change, 55(4), 773–799.
Pugh, C. (2025). Echoes of history: Legacies of the Benin bronzes and restitution within the Black Atlantic. The Journal of African History, 66, e17.
Ratner, S. R. (2025). Reparations for colonialism beyond legal responsibility. American Journal of International Law, 119(3), 507–529.
The Eastern Updates. (2025, March 10). Technical glitch: US embassy plans new visa interview dates. https://theeasternupdates.com/2025/03/10/technical-glitch-us-embassy-plans-new-visa-interview-dates/
The Eastern Updates. (2025, June 27). US announces new visa restriction policy against drugs. https://theeasternupdates.com/2025/06/27/us-announces-new-visa-restriction-policy-against-drugs/
The Eastern Updates. (2025, December 21). US expands restrictions, suspends green card, citizenship for Nigerians. https://theeasternupdates.com/2025/12/21/us-expands-restrictions-suspends-green-card-citizenship-for-nigerians/
The Eastern Updates. (2025, December 28). UK restricts DR Congo visas over migrant returns. https://theeasternupdates.com/2025/12/28/uk-restricts-dr-congo-visas-over-migrant-returns/
The Eastern Updates. (2026, January 14). US suspends visa processing for 75 countries, Nigeria affected. https://theeasternupdates.com/2026/01/14/us-suspends-visa-processing-for-75-countries-nigeria-affected/
