Articles

Expert on jihadi-insurgent groups Christopher Anzalone talks about the recent activity and future of the jihadist group Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

In this article — across two experimental studies — the authors find evidence that Sub-Saharan African politicians who commit to climate change policies may lose electoral support. Electorally important swing voters with weak party affiliations are least likely to support party statements about climate change. Interviews with standing elected officials from Malawi and South Africa corroborate the experimental findings. The combined results suggest voter preferences may hinder the successful implementation of climate change policy in Sub-Saharan African democracies.

Alliances between local combatants and neighboring rulers played a crucial role in the Congo Wars. Yet the transnational dimensions of the conflicts remain understudied. Case studies reveal that the rulers of Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe intervened in Congo to secure their own political survival. They forged alliances to thwart domestic rebels supported by foreign rulers or to gain access to resources that could ensure the loyalty of domestic elites.

Which armed groups have perpetrated sexual violence in recent conflicts? This article presents patterns from the new Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset. The dataset, coded from the three most widely used sources in the quantitative human rights literature, covers 129 active conflicts, and the 625 armed actors involved in these conflicts, during the period 1989–2009.

This article shows how international humanitarian aid, particularly food aid, has played an instrumental role in perpetuating chronic civil war and state collapse in Somalia from 1992–2012. During the 1992 famine, food aid created lucrative opportunities for criminal elements of the Somali business community, who partnered with local warlords to create an enduring system of corruption and aid dependence. International aid financed this elite pact between business and warlords, which subsequently undermined domestic processes of order-making and reduced the bargaining power of local communities in the peace-building process.

Successful environmental management is partly contingent on the effective recognition and communication of environmental health risks to the public. Yet risk perceptions are known to differ between experts and laypeople; laypeople often exhibit higher perceptions of risk in comparison to experts, particularly when these risks are associated with radiation, nuclear power, or nuclear waste. This paper consequently explores stakeholder risk perceptions associated with a mercury-contaminated chloralkali production facility in Kazakhstan.