Haitian migrants to the Dominican Republic are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking, yet antitrafficking initiatives tend to overlook them. The paradox plagues much antitrafficking research and policymaking. The same factors that make people vulnerable to trafficking—race, class, gender, immigration status—also exclude them from initiatives to protect them.

In the case of Haitian migrants, being black, poor, and mostly men with an irregular immigration status means they are more likely to be viewed as smuggled persons (and therefore as criminals) rather than as trafficked persons (and therefore as victims). Correcting this problem requires a focus on human security rather than on state security. And a greater appreciation of the structural causes of vulnerability to human trafficking is needed.

“Resilience means the ability to cope and move ahead,” said Joan Dalton, the gender lead at THINK Liberia during the second session in a series of conversations on resilience and health at the Wilson Center. As conflicts, epidemics, and natural disasters increasingly leave global health systems vulnerable to devastation, it is important to build resilient health systems through interventions that support community resilience, agreed global health experts at the panel event co-hosted by CARE and the Maternal Health Initiative.

 For island nations already dealing with more frequent and intense extreme weather events, climate change is an imposing burden. But many island states are responding and becoming “incubators of resilience,” as Lynae Bresser recently wrote.

In June 2010, The New York Times published a front page story trumpeting a Pentagon announcement of roughly $1 trillion worth of mineral resources in Afghanistan. Officials said the discovery was “far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” Then-President Hamid Karzai soon inflated the figure to $3 trillion and then again to $30 trillion, enough to transform the country into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

In the late 1990s, world leaders came together to create the Millennium Development Goals – time-bound, quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty and human health and well-being. Notable among them was to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to water and sanitation.”

The government of El Salvador took a truly extraordinary step in an attempt to control the rapidly spreading Zika virus last week by asking its citizens to avoid getting pregnant from now until 2018. Yes, you read that right.

The sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls must be protected, even – especially – during “the toughest of times, in the hardest of places,” said Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), at the Wilson Center on December 3. [Video Below]

The world is more connected than ever before, but also more complex. Big, transnational trends like climate change, urbanization, and migration are changing the calculus of geopolitics, while local-level inequalities persist. “[Change] seems to be spinning around us so fast,” said John Hempelmann, president of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, which honors the legacy of the late senator from Washington State. How can today’s and tomorrow’s leaders adjust to global trends? [Video Below]