Showing posts from category security.
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Improving Food Security Through Land Rights and Access to Family Planning
›“In a future world affected by climate change, population growth is one lever that can be addressed to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, particularly in the area of food security,” write Scott Moreland and Ellen Smith in “Modeling Climate Change, Food Security, and Population,” a recent study for MEASURE Evaluation and USAID. Moreland and Smith combine demographic changes, food needs, and economic capacity into a single aggregate model to assess how family planning and climate change might affect food security from now until 2050. Using Ethiopia as an example, the model finds that if access to family planning services were increased to meet existing needs, the subsequent decrease in demand for food would reduce child malnutrition and effectively counteract a projected 25 percent shortfall in caloric availability from climate change’s impact on agriculture. Programs designed to increase access to family planning should therefore be incorporated into national adaptation and food security strategies, they conclude. “Family planning, especially in countries with high unmet need, provides a potential solution not only for women’s reproductive health, but also for adapting to the effects of climate change.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on World Food Security recently endorsed a set of voluntary guidelines for land tenure governance in the context of food security that aims to strike a balance between encouraging productive investment and ensuring equitable and sustainable development. Population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation are putting pressure on the legal and cultural systems that govern land rights, resulting in “inadequate and insecure tenure rights” which can “increase vulnerability, hunger and poverty, and can lead to conflict and environmental degradation when competing users fight for control of these resources.” The guidelines, drawn from consultations with hundreds of people from both the private and public spheres and representing more than 130 countries, emphasize the need to safeguard access to land, fisheries, and forests – as well as the resources they provide – in a way that respects customary tenure systems, which are not always reflected in official tenure policies or records. They also emphasize strengthening the ownership rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups in order to enhance food security and minimize the risk of instability and conflict in the future. -
The Global Water Security Assessment and U.S. National Security Implications
›“Water security is about much more than access to H2O,” said Jane Harman, director, president, and CEO of the Wilson Center at the May 9 meeting, “Global Water Security: The Intelligence Community Assessment.” The event – part of the Wilson Center’s National Conversation Series – brought together a number of experts to discuss a recently released intelligence community assessment of global water security. [Video Below]
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Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
›“What we have discovered is that the very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, it’s not its level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ it belongs to, but is in fact best predicted by the level of violence against women in the society,” said Valerie Hudson, co-author of Sex and World Peace, at an April 26 book launch at the Wilson Center. [Video Below]
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Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Environment and Security [Part Two]
›In the coming years, Nigeria’s cohort of unemployed youth has equal potential to “be converted into either a religious or a regional clash, as certain youths get opportunities and other youths do not,” said Pauline Baker, President Emeritus of the Fund for Peace, during the day-long “Nigeria Behind the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center on the April 25 (read part one here). [Video Below]
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Michael Kugelman, AfPak Channel
Pakistan’s Climate Change Challenge
›May 11, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffLast month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan’s environmental insecurity.
Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as “the world’s highest waste dump.” Much of this waste-generated from soldiers’ food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan’s chief water source.
Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan’s environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan’s United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan’s land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh’s environment minister said that millions of people across the province face “acute environmental threats.”
Continue reading on the AfPak Channel.
Sources: Daily Times, Dawn.com, Environment News Service, The Express Tribune, The New York Times, Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan.
Photo Credit: “Surveying damage in Pakistan,” courtesy of the U.S. Army.
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Jack Goldstone on Post-Cold War Trends in Armed Conflict and Challenges for the World’s Youth
›“Global trends in armed conflict have really come down since the end of the Cold War,” said George Mason University’s Jack Goldstone in this talk adapted from a presentation at the Wilson Center last fall. This drop is a reflection of decreased proxy conflicts between the Soviet Union and United States and increased interventionism from the international community. But another thing we can point to is that the world’s youth population has also declined, he said.“Global trends in armed conflict have really come down since the end of the Cold War,” said George Mason University’s Jack Goldstone in this talk adapted from a presentation at the Wilson Center last fall. This drop is a reflection of decreased proxy conflicts between the Soviet Union and United States and increased interventionism from the international community. But another thing we can point to is that the world’s youth population has also declined, he said.
“There seems to be a reasonably strong connection, between the drop-off in post-Cold War conflicts” and a decline in the proportion of youth in global population. This ageing, however, has been uneven across the globe and risks remain, said Goldstone.
“Ninety percent of all children under the age of 15 in the world today are growing up outside of North America, Europe, and the wealthy countries of East Asia,” he said, and in four or five decades time, “90 percent of the workforce of the world will be workers that have grown up outside of the rich countries.” It is this population’s “future productivity [that] will go far to determining whether quality of life gets better or worse.”
Demography and State Fragility
States across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East that perform poorly in indexes of state fragility also tend to have the youngest populations. “This could be just an unhappy coincidence,” said Goldstone, “but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think what we’re seeing is a kind of virtuous and vicious circle.”
“Where government is weak, ineffective, doesn’t provide education, doesn’t provide security, it’s advantageous both for individuals and for groups to have larger families,” he said. “However, as population grows, it’s more difficult for the government to provide adequate education and security for the larger, more youthful population.”
“On the other hand, if you can get on the track for a stronger, more legitimate government – a government that’s able to provide education, provide security of property, [and] encourage investment…fertility tends to drop quickly.” “This in turn re-enforces the ability of governments to direct resources to education and economic growth,” said Goldstone.
Critical Role of Governance
“Mobilization for political conflict draws heavily on youthful populations,” said Goldstone. As research by Henrik Urdal has shown, a bulge in the population of youth does appear to increase the risk of conflict. However, this relationship is strongly mediated by regime type. While strong democracies and autocracies are considered relatively stable, there is a “risk zone” in between, where instability is more likely.
“We live in a world where the countries with weak, fragile governments [are] about a third of the global population. But in another 30 years, if things remain as they are in terms of governance, you’re looking at closer to half the world’s population living in those more difficult circumstances,” he said.
“If the democracy is not well established, if rule of law is not well regulated, than people don’t necessary trust the outcome of peaceful electoral competition,” said Goldstone. “If people don’t like the outcome of an election, or they feel they’re being excluded, or things are one sided, they may mobilize.” This lack of political trust can result in instability and violence such as the recent protests by Thailand’s “red shirts.”
Although many Latin American and Asian states are heading towards “voluntary reduced fertility, strong economic growth, and stronger and more stable governments,” a real risk remains, he asserted. Africa, for instance, is “liable to gain a billion out of the next two billion in global population growth.”
Challenges for the Future
“For me, there are two big challenges posed by global demography,” opined Goldstone.
First, “given that 90 percent of today’s youth are in developing nations, providing them with opportunities to become productive adults through education, stable environment, [and] socialization is crucial.”
And second, in order to deliver those services, “strengthening governance in the countries where those youth live, in order for those education, security, and social services to be provided,” is absolutely necessary for economic development and reducing political instability.
While incidences of conflict have declined, the effects of those intractable conflicts that remain – in particular the sharp increase in the number of refugees and displaced populations uprooted by conflict – are solid arguments for continuing to address this risk. -
Updates to African Conflict Database Give Researchers Access to Comprehensive, Near Real-Time Information
›Despite the end of Cold War-era civil wars, political violence rates in Africa remain remarkably high. However, this broad statement hides an important qualification: the types of violence that have persisted in recent years have changed significantly, shifting from rebel and government activity towards violence against civilians, riots, protests, and battles by armed groups other than rebels.
The only way researchers can track this activity is through political violence data disaggregated by type, location, and time. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) project aims to provide that service. We recently released updated information on political violence across Africa from January 1997 to December 2011 (see above for a hotspot map and timeline of violence over this period).
New to the ACLED project are real time data and trend reports on monthly conflict patterns throughout the continent. It is now perhaps the comprehensive and representative depiction of political violence as it occurs throughout Africa.
The data captures an array of actions including battles, looting, rioting, protesting, violence against civilians, and non-violent activity (such as arrests, recruitment drives, troop movements) by a variety of actors such as governments, rebels, militias, rioters and protestors.
Each event is geo-referenced by location and time-stamped by day. In our recently released version, we also included fatalities by event; distinguished conflict groups by their type (government, rebel, political militia, communal militia, rioters, protesters, civilians etc.); and specified the type of interaction between actors (e.g. government-rebel battle; rebel-civilian attack). These changes make ACLED data flexible for multiple uses.
Several new findings on conflict patterns are found using ACLED data:- Violence against civilians accounts for approximately half of all conflict events.
- Generally, where they occur, civil wars intensely affect 19 percent of a state’s territory, yet rebel actions have drastically decreased since 2005.
- Militia activity has significantly increased since 2005 and is especially high during election periods in new democracies.
- Communal violence patterns are more widespread but affect fewer people than civil war violence.
- Civil war patterns are not strongly affected by climate changes, but communal conflict decreases during periods of local scarcity and increases on the cusp of rainy seasons.
- Political violence increases in the period from peace talk announcements to negotiations. This violence is directed towards overtaking territory and civilians are frequently the main victims.
Fine-grained data on the range of political violence in the developing world is important as it provides the opportunity to ask and potentially answer certain questions about a range of issues related to governance, economic development, and conflict dynamics themselves.
For example, ACLED data shows that violence is increasingly occurring in villages, towns, and cities across Africa. In other words, political violence may be “urbanizing.” This has important implications for how we understand the practice of politics, the geography of marginalization, and the role of trigger patterns in explaining conflict. But there are many competing theories that could explain this trend.
Using data that disaggregates by violence type allows us to probe deeper: If the environmental security framework is correct, political violence in towns may be a response to high in-migration from rural areas to cities. Violence therefore is due to competition between urban people and migrant populations.
An alternative explanation is that the poor conditions of African urban life, high rates of informal employment, and under-representation of urban communities in government might explain an increase in violence. In this case, violence is a populist response, in that civilians riot and protest in favor of government reform.
Finally, the advantages of densely populated urban areas – easier access to resources, recruits, infrastructure, and power – may attract more organized groups to contest these spaces. If this explanation were correct, we would expect higher rates of rebel activity against government forces in cities, with a clear drive to overtaking the capital.
We have not been able to address these questions before with credible and comprehensive data, but now we can. Indeed, such data is crucial for interrogating the climate-security debate.
For example, Clionadh recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Peace Research’s special issue on climate and conflict, which used ACLED data for East Africa. In that piece, she and her co-author argued that different conflict groups use their environment in accordance with their overall goals. While much of the conflict activity studied had an environmental signal, the climate signal was much weaker.
We hope that these studies and other work with disaggregated data spur more theories and explanations of conflict patterns in developing states, and that the breadth and form of the data allows for new directions within conflict research.
Clionadh Raleigh is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Trinity College, Dublin, external researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and director of the ACLED project. Caitriona Dowd of Trinity College and Andrew Linke of the University of Colorado are senior researchers for ACLED.
Image Credit: ACLED. -
Richard Matthew: Responsive Peacebuilding Includes the Environment and Natural Resources
›April 30, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“After 20 years of peacebuilding experimentation, one of the good signs is that the countries receiving this [peacebuilding] attention…more and more are shaping the process,” said Professor Richard Matthew, director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine.
Peacebuilding is shifting, he said, from internationals going in with pre-existing conceptions of “what you need for stability and development, what will make you attractive to investors, what will make your people secure,” to instead sitting down and talking with stakeholders about “what types of capacity do you need, and how can we support you in acquiring those.”
Along with the shift towards more responsive peacebuilding has come an elevated interested in the environment and natural resources. For people living in the peacebuilding countries themselves, “there was never any doubt that water and forest and access to minerals and so on were critical to their future,” said Matthew, but Western and Northern countries often thought of it as a “second tier issue that you might get to once people were safe, and the government was functioning, and the economy was up and running again.”
Matthew co-authored the 2009 UNEP report, From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, which examined environmental factors all along the conflict continuum – from inception to peacebuilding. Successful peacebuilding, the report argues, requires that “environmental drivers are managed, that tensions are defused, and that natural assets are used sustainably to support stability and development in the long term.”
