Breakfast seminar: What can we do to ensure peace and security in a new era of complex risk?
Welcome to the launch of this new timely report: ‘Environment of Peace’!
Central Asia is a missing link in analyses of critical materials for the global clean energy transition
The energy transition is causing a surge in demand for minerals for clean energy technologies, giving rise to concerns about the sources and security of supplies of critical materials. Although Central Asia was one of the Soviet Union's main sources of metals and industrial minerals, it has been forgotten in contemporary global critical materials analyses. Here we review the Central Asian mineral resource base and assess its current and potential contributions to global supply chains. We find that the importance of Central Asia lies mainly in the diversity of its mineral base, which includes mineable reserves of most critical materials for clean energy applications. This renders the region important in mineral economics, security of supply, and geopolitical perspectives alike. In sum, Central Asia is likely to become a new hotspot for mineral extraction and a major global supplier of selected critical materials for clean energy technologies.
Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet: Afghanistan
Afghanistan is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change: rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Currently, Afghanistan is experiencing its worst drought in 27 years, which, compounded with COVID-19 and the economic contraction that followed the takeover of the government by the Taliban in August 2021, has significantly increased livelihood and food insecurity and contributed to a growing humanitarian emergency. Climate change exacerbates the deteriorating conditions for agriculture-based livelihoods and food insecurity. Conflict and the effects of climate change have increased internal displacement and changed migration patterns. High levels of displacement accentuate food and livelihood insecurity and increase the vulnerability of marginalised groups, including women. The effects of climate change may heighten the risk of more frequent and intense local conflicts over land and water and increase tensions over transboundary resources. Conflict has eroded the resilience of communities and local authorities to adapt to climate change and to deal with the current humanitarian crisis. This creates opportunities for elites to manipulate and profit from land and water disputes, with elevated risks for marginalised groups.
Rebel governance? A literature review of Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province
The literature on rebel governance has fundamentally challenged the idea that ‘governance’ is the sole prerogative of ‘government’. Despite important advances over the past decade, studies have largely addressed rebel governance from an ‘institutionalist’ approach. This review seeks to go beyond an ‘institutionalist’ approach, by understanding ‘governance’ as the ‘whole set of practices and norms that govern daily life in a specific territory’. Drawing on a thorough review of literature on Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), this working paper analyses five under-examined independent variables that shape rebel governance in Nigeria’s north-east and Niger: illegitimate state practices, community resilience, and cohesion, external counterinsurgency actions, ‘big men’, and ideology.
Theoretical Approaches to Crisis: An Introduction
This chapter sums up the key arguments made in this section of the Handbook. The nine chapters discuss essential EU integration and International Relations approaches and how they study, understand, and explain crisis’ putative impact on the EU: Liberal Intergovernmentalism, Classical Realism, Neo-realism, Neofunctionalism, Institutionalism, Organizational Theory, Cleavage Theory, Social constructivism, and Deliberative Theory. For this purpose, each chapter sets out the theory’s basic assumptions before addressing the following questions: (1) How does each theoretical perspective expect crisis to influence EU institutions and policies? What are the causal mechanisms to account for continuity or change in public policy and governing institutions? (2) To what extent has the perspective so far been able to explain change or continuity in the EU in the face of crisis?
The Migration Crisis: An Introduction
In 2015, the EU and its member states struggled to coordinate, communicate, and cooperate on the migration crisis as the chapters in this section show. Schilde and Wallace Goodman point out that while border security contains examples of deeper integration, asylum management policy has followed the scenarios of breaking down and muddling through. All the authors highlight the Dublin convention as particularly ill-devised and thus paving the way for the refugee crisis. Bosilca finds evidence for breaking down in addition to minimal reforms of border security policy that constitute muddling through. Crawford argues that the migration crisis provides evidence both of muddling through and heading forward and is thus more optimistic than either Schilde and Wallace Goodman or Bosilca about the prospects for EU integration in this policy area.
Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet: South Sudan
Unpredictable annual variations in extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, affect agriculture-dependent communities and influence pastoralist mobility patterns and routes. Such changes may intensify the risk of tensions between herders and farmers, often in connection with land, grazing, water and communal affairs. Transhumance, including cross-border migration from Sudan through the Greater Upper Nile in particular, exacerbates the spread of veterinary diseases and fuels environmental degradation and competition over scarce resources. Women and girls continue to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change; female-headed households are especially vulnerable. Climate-related livestock losses compounded by pre-existing rivalries increase the risk of cattle raiding, which can trigger retaliation, communal conflict, displacement, deepening intercommunal rivalry and the formation of armed groups.
Ståle Ulriksen
Ståle Ulriksen is a researcher at the Norwegian Naval College, part of the Norwegian Defence University, with a 20 percent position at NUPI, in Th...
Asha Ali
Asha Ali was an Advisor at NUPI until the summer of 2024. She worked in the Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development.
Climate, Peace and Security: Sudan
Sudan is severely exposed to climate change. As one of the world’s least developed countries, extreme weather, recurrent floods and droughts, and changing precipitation interact with other vulnerabilities – such as ecosystem degradation, unsustainable agricultural practices, natural resource scarcities and resource-based conflicts – limiting societal capacities to cope and adapt. The economic consequences of COVID-19, ongoing political instability (further aggravated by the October 2021 military coup), and rising inflation all weaken state and societal resilience, livelihoods and food security. ● Rising temperatures, rainfall variability, and droughts and floods negatively impact agriculture, livelihoods and food security. In particular, the adverse effects of climate change, combined with gender-based disparities in natural resource governance, accentuate the climate-related security risks for women and girls. ● High levels of displacement sharpen humanitarian needs and vulnerability to the effects of climate change; shifting migration patterns in response to changing resource availability may increase the risk of local conflicts in some areas. ● Various conflict dynamics and decades of political interference, local conflicts (interlinked with land and natural resources) and ongoing political instability have undermined traditional resource management systems and state governance. ● The legacies of natural resource mismanagement have increased the marginalisation of rural communities and accelerated land degradation, excacerbating local vulnerabilities that add to the human security risks associated with climate change.