CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Uzodinma Iweala The African Apocalypses Project: Africa, Catastrophic Risk, and the Politics of Global Futures
The African Apocalypses Project is a five-year initiative designed to improve the accuracy and equity of global catastrophic-risk assessment by identifying how narrative distortions about Africa shape forecasting and decision-making across climate, AI, biosecurity, ecological collapse, and governance-risk domains. Using a framework called mediated geopolitics, the project examines how narrative assumptions become embedded in computational models and policy systems, creating blind spots that obscure critical pathways of systemic harm. A key methodological innovation is the creation of a natural language processing (NLP) tool and curated archive to map catastrophic-risk discourse across African, Western, global, and multilateral contexts, enabling large-scale comparative analysis of how risk is framed and prioritized. This computational work is complemented by qualitative field research and surveys of policymakers to understand how narrative biases influence institutional choices.