Mitchel Stuffers
Assistant Editor at CIGH Exeter & PhD Candidate in History, University of Exeter

From Nigeria’s risk of hunger to poem & picture collections on slavery and heritage, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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UN says 35 million Nigerians risk hunger after global funding collapse

Camillus Eboh
Reuters

Nearly 35 million Nigerians are at risk of hunger this year, including 3 million children facing severe malnutrition, the United Nations said on Thursday, following the collapse of global aid budgets. Speaking at the launch of the 2026 humanitarian plan in Abuja, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Mohamed Malick Fall said the long-dominant, foreign-led aid model in Nigeria is no longer sustainable and that Nigeria’s needs have grown.

Conditions in the conflict-hit northeast are dire, Fall said, with civilians in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states facing rising violence. A surge in suicide bombings and widespread attacks killed more than 4,000 people in the first eight months of 2025, matching the toll for all of 2023, he said. The UN can only aim to deliver $516 million to provide lifesaving aid to 2.5 million people this year, down from 3.6 million in 2025, which in turn was about half the previous year’s level. “These are not statistics. These numbers represent lives, futures and Nigerians,” Fall said. [Continue reading]

Ending ‘autonomy’: How the SDF-Syrian govt talks broke down into a fight

Ehsan Salah, Lina Attalah, and Najih Dawoud
Mada Masr

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the president of Syria’s interim government, stood before a pool of reporters on Sunday evening. He had just spent several contentious hours in a meeting with Syrian Democratic Forces head Mazloum Abdi and United States Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack in which the parties had hammered out a deal to bring an end to days-long clashes between the government and the SDF and integrate the Kurdish-led coalition into the central government.

By that time, the Syrian government had already made sweeping gains into SDF-held territory over the previous 48 hours. Arab members of the SDF coalition had switched alliances, clearing the way for a stunning advance. And the US, which was reportedly considering sanctions on the central government if it advanced into SDF held territory in the country’s southeast only days before, stood alongside Sharaa in the meeting. [Continue reading]

Controversy as outgoing PM signs up Bulgaria to Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’

The Sofia Globe Staff
Sofia Globe

Controversy has ensued from outgoing Prime Minister Rossen Zhelyazkov signing up Bulgaria at a January 22 event to US president Trump’s “Board of Peace”. Nineteen countries signed up at the ceremony in Davos, with only two from the European Union – Bulgaria and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, while most EU countries are reserved about the Trump project.

Manol Peykov, an MP for opposition We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria, said on January 22 that he would table a question in Parliament to Zhelyazkov about Bulgaria’s participation in the “Board of Peace”. Peykov said on social media that he would ask Zhelyazkov what the outgoing government’s vision is on the issue and “isn’t it correct for such a strategic decision to be made with ratification by the Bulgarian Parliament, and not on the executive branch’s own initiative?”. [Continue reading]

Writer’s poems helped boost the abolition campaign

Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley
BBC News

Letters written by a prominent abolitionist are being digitised, filling in a “massive bit of the jigsaw” in the abolition campaign history, experts say. Novelist Hannah More, born in Bristol in 1745, also helped open some of the UK’s first schools for working class people. University of Bristol research fellow Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, who is helping to digitise her letters, said she is a “prominent part” of the local landscape with many buildings named after her in Bristol and Somerset.

Nailsea historian Dr Jo Edwards said: “It’s not just an academic project that doesn’t involve normal people. It’s a community resource.” Edwards said the letters give residents “a huge insight” into local history. “Some of these things mean a massive bit of the jigsaw has been filled in,” she added. [Continue reading]

Sweet thing: a personal look at a photographer’s Cuban slavery heritage – photo essay

Jorge Luis Alvarez Pupo
Guardian

From the remnants of my great-grandparents’ Cuban home near the sugar plantation that is part of Unesco’s Slave Route programme – where they were once enslaved – to personal artefacts, each piece reconstructs an uncertain past. Unfortunately, for millions of people worldwide, retracing a past filled with unfinished stories is like trying to nurture a tree whose roots have been severed.

Several years ago, a teenage relative was presenting the entire family tree at a reunion in Belgium. At a given moment, an elder turned to me and asked if I had ever traced my ancestry back in Cuba. I looked at her with a mix of irony and cynicism then briefly explained that trying to put together my genealogy would be like assembling a puzzle that is missing most of the main pieces. The reason? Some of my ancestors are included in the statistics related to the slave trade, that shameful process in which millions of human beings were trafficked and deprived of any connection to their environment of origin. The first step was to change their names. [Continue reading]