When I arrived at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar in July, the infamous monsoon was well underway. The rain was intense, roads were muddy, and it was very difficult to move around. Cox’s Bazar—the closest big town to the Rohingya refugee camps—is now the base city for most of the humanitarian agencies working with the refugees. The distance between Cox’s Bazar and Kutupalong Camp—the world’s largest refugee camp—is barely 30 kilometers. However, due to the rain and the area’s hilly terrain, it seemed like it took ages to get there.

The research presented in this article was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed article: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-73065-9_3

The Kurdish people’s century-long quest for self-determination reveals a key aspect of ethnic separatist conflicts. Ideas of nationhood can endure for generations, unifying people across borders and often making separatist conflicts hard to resolve. But how much harder is it to resolve separatist conflicts than other violent, non-territorial intra-state wars (such as political revolutions)? In practical terms, how much longer, on average, can policymakers expect separatist conflicts to persist and reoccur than the typical political revolution? These are tough questions. Surprisingly, demography helps us find the answers.

The shift to a low-carbon economy is not only underway, it is accelerating. Last year, Costa Rica generated more than 99 percent of its electricity using renewable sources;  Germany expanded its onshore wind power capacity by 5,300 MW, and in the United States, more than 62 percent of new power plants under construction will produce renewable energy. What does this rapid increase mean for the countries that supply the inputs required to build these new facilities—particularly those countries that are struggling with fragility or corruption?

 This is what a water panic looks like in a major global city.

People hoard water. They queue for hours, well into the night, to fill jugs at natural springs. Like mad Christmas shoppers, they clear supermarkets of bottled water. They descend on stockers before they can fill the shelves.

China—the world’s fastest-growing economy with the largest population—leads the world in cement production, the critical ingredient that has built China’s mammoth cities, sprawling roads, and other infrastructure. China pours 60 percent of the world’s cement; the country’s production in 2011-2013 surpassed U.S. production for the entire 20th century. While it paved the way for Chinese growth, it came at a dangerous cost: 1.6 million Chinese citizens die each year from respiratory illnesses linked to small particulate matter emissions, of which 27 percent come from cement production.

While most people killed in wars are male, several studies have found that “mortality among women in some high-intensity conflicts was as severe as male mortality,” said Henrik Urdal, the Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), at a recent Wilson Center event on the links between maternal and child health, aid, and armed conflict. “Maternal health is a very natural place to start” when researching excess mortality and indirect deaths among women impacted by war, said Urdal.

Last month, Bolivia filed a counterclaim against Chile in the International Court of Justice—the latest salvo in their battle over rights to the waters of the Silala River. The court will decide whether Silala is “an international watercourse”—thus granting water rights to Chilean mining operations—or simply an artificial diversion of Bolivian spring water by Chile. This legal case marks the latest chapter in Bolivia and Chile’s historically delicate relationship, which dates back to the War of the Pacific in the late 19^th century.

“It’s not often that we have the opportunity to go back to a site 20 years later and see what happened,” said Cynthia Gill, Director of USAID’s Office of Forestry and Biodiversity during a recent Wilson Center event on a retrospective evaluation of the “conservation enterprise” approach to biodiversity. Conservation enterprises are income-generating activities that provide social and economic benefits and help meet conservation goals.