Since the end of World War II, a number of the world’s most dramatic political events have resulted from demographic shifts and governments’ reaction to them. Despite this, political demography remains a neglected topic of scholarly investigation.

“You can’t build a peaceful world on an empty stomach,” Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday at a high-level working session on resilience and food security, quoting Norman Borlaug, the father of last century’s “Green Revolution.”

As presidents, prime ministers, and other policymakers from across the continent gather in Washington, DC, this week for the first-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, what are the issues to watch?

Asia is going through an unprecedented wave of urbanization. Secondary and tertiary cities are seeing the most rapid changes in land-use and ownership, social structures, and values as peri-urban and agricultural land become part of metropolitan cityscapes. All the while, climate change is making many of these fast-growing cities more vulnerable to disasters.

Many existing water-sharing treaties should be re-assessed in the context of climate change, write Shlomi Dinar, David Katz, Lucia De Stefano, and Brian Blakespoor in a World Bank working paper.

When Pakistan makes the news, more often than not it’s for one of two things: violent extremism or drone strikes. Adil Najam, a Pakistan expert and a lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says those headlines distract from a far more pressing security concern for the country: climate change.

You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with climate change, but as I listened last month to historian James Graham Wilson talk about the “triumph of improvisation” that ended the nearly 50-year stare-down between the United States and the U.S.S.R., I was struck by the parallels. The idea of individual leaders escaping the momentum of conventional approaches and adapting on the fly to solve a major global issue deeply resonated with me. It’s exactly what international climate change negotiations desperately need.