Africa

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

"Local pro-IS figures are willing, it seems, to move away from the actual IS organization's general practices, in particular related to the violence of control, in order to win over new supporters.  In Kenya, for example, pro-IS voices are reportedly attempt to lure support with promises of a decrease in violence (such as the implementation of the hudud or 'set' punishments for certain crimes such as murder and theft in Islamic criminal law) and lower taxes than with Al-Shabab."

On January 30, 2015, Matthew Bunn presented "Mitigating Climate Change: How Much Can We Hope For From Nuclear Power?" for the Harvard University Model United Nations. The full presentation is below.

"Mobile-based financial tools are thus highly vulnerable to abuse by money launderers and terrorist financiers. But if governments and financial institutions find ways of addressing these security issues, the mobile-finance revolution could provide benefits far beyond helping the poor."

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.

Wartime rape is neither ubiquitous nor inevitable. The level of sexual violence differs significantly across countries, conflicts, and particularly armed groups. Some armed groups can and do prohibit sexual violence. Such variation suggests that policy interventions should also be focused on armed groups, and that commanders in effective control of their troops are legally liable for patterns of sexual violence they fail or refuse to prevent.

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.