“Alphonse, however, had not come to talk. Without saying a word, he raised a machete and brought it down onto his uncle’s skull.”

In a headline–making article in the journal PNAS, Colin P. Kelley et al. write there is evidence that the ongoing conflict in Syria, which has killed at least 200,000, was triggered by climate change. Severe drought from 2007 to 2010 caused a massive rural-to-urban demographic shift which exacerbated pre-existing sociopolitical tensions in Syrian cities already inundated with Iraqi refugees.

When I began working in Liberia right after the Accra settlement ended Liberia’s civil war in 2003, I could not help worrying about whether the peace would last. Burnt-out cars lined the streets of Monrovia, bullet holes scarred many of its buildings and the wary U.N. peacekeepers manning checkpoints behind sandbags and barbed wire reinforced the sense that violence could flare up again at any time.

The Sahel – spreading from the Red Sea to the Atlantic as the Sahara Desert transitions to Sudanian savanna – is drought prone and suffers from chronic food insecurity. Yet, the region also boasts the highest fertility rates in the world, and the highest rates of marriage for young girls. This creates unique vulnerabilities that are being compounded by climate change, says ECSP’s Roger-Mark De Souza in an episode of Wilson Center NOW.

In 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package for a country it had all but abandoned just 10 years earlier. Indeed, if one word can summarize the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, “volatile” might be it. Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. has appropriated nearly $61 billion in aid to Pakistan – more than twice what it received since independence in 1947.

Climate change and youthful demographics can combine to create security risks in already fragile contexts, according to a new report commissioned by UNICEF UK and co-authored by the London-based research organizations International Alert and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The story of Uma Tudu captures the endless cycle of poverty, violence, and suffering faced by too many girls in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.* At 16, following floods that destroyed her village, she traveled more than 1,600 kilometers to Delhi, lured by the promise of a good job and a good life. Instead she was sold as bonded labor.