Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the Anthropocene Epoch. Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, inflicting changes that may persist for millennia. 

Early scholarship on environmental peacemaking recognized the important role that local civil-society can play in promoting regional cooperation while, at the same time, pressuring governments to protect the environment. For example, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya in Uzbekistan and the Dashowuz Ecological Club in Turkmenistan, were at the forefront of the fight to restore the Aral Sea and protect the region’s biodiversity.

First published 30 years ago in the National Interest, Francis Fukuyama’s landmark essay, “The End of History?,” argued that, with the fall of fascism and communism, no serious blueprint for modern-state development lay open, save for those paths that would ultimately embrace both political and economic liberalism. Over the past two decades, movement toward this ideal end-state has trickled to a halt. Instead, the political elites of Eurasia’s regional powers—Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China—have crafted stable illiberal regimes that borrow whatever they need from free-market economics, electoral politics, nationalism, and religion. Their ascent has produced a form of “non-endpoint stability”—two mutually antagonistic camps: one composed of liberal democracies, the other a mix of illiberal hybrids. As long as these camps remain stable, the international system falls far short of Fukuyama’s theoretical end of history.

Meaningful engagement with the social and conflict implications of climate change in Solomon Islands must be firmly grounded within local worldviews—within Solomon Islanders’ physical, economic, political, and social and spiritual worlds. As we note in a recent policy brief for the Toda Peace Institute, when addressing conflict challenges exacerbated or caused by climate change, approaches should be draw upon community understandings of what constitutes peace and justice. 

In the Global South, natural resource conflict has largely been considered a consequence of poor governance and weak political institutions. The international community’s solution? Build “green” governance capacity as a way to mitigate violent conflict and improve environmental outcomes. For the international development community, this has meant introducing laws, policies, and practices based on international standards of best practice, and training local regulators to adhere to those standards.

“We are all convinced that educational entertainment is the way to go now,” said Anselme Muzalia Wimye, Program Quality Director at Search for Common Ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He spoke at a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, Maternal Health Initiative, and The Population Institute. The panel discussed the power of educational entertainment (EE), in particular serial dramas, to precipitate positive behavioral change and public health outcomes in Africa. 

Climate change is being increasingly framed as a security issue—a “threat multiplier” that can amplify the risks of breakdowns in peacefulness. Yet, even extreme climate hazards do not always lead to higher levels of violence.

Africa in Transition, a new series hosted by the Wilson Center and the Population Institute, explores the role of population trends—migration, urbanization, fertility, maternal mortality—in shaping sub-Saharan Africa’s chances for prosperity, health, and security. In this podcast, we share highlights from the first Africa in Transition event. Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, Professor at Cornell University, starts the conversation by reminding us that “African countries are in the middle of multiple transitions that have the potential to create opportunities for prosperity, growth, and increased human capital, but also to create greater inequality. The challenge, therefore, is to build prosperity, but to do it for all.”