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Following up on last year's interview, The Broker held another exclusive interview with Ángel Losada, the EU Special Representative for the Sahel. We met with Losada at a timely moment, shortly after the announcement of a new joint force of five S...

Mali’s multi-layered conflicts cannot be understood from a single analytical perspective, it is not one conflict - but a dynamic system of conflicts.

The Sahel has become an economic, social and political breeding ground for violence but donor spending does not seem to address the region's main challenges.

With the start of a new year, the time has come to reflect on what has passed and look towards what is to come in 2017. A shortlist of 5 unmissable articles published by The Broker in 2016 provides a great start.

The new EU migration trust fund's use of development aid and its focus on ‘migration management’ securitizes both development and migration policy and will end up serving neither.

Practical and concrete approaches to regional food trade could advance a common political agenda and, thereby, positively impact on the Sahelian security situation

The EU Special Representative for the Sahel has been given the mandate to address the issue of continuing insecurity, the main cause of migration out of the region.

Sahel governments in the region have never been more concerned about the fight against terror yet security first approaches struggle to have impact.

The security situation in the Sahel region has become highly volatile over the past years. Due to its geographical position, the Malian state is particularly prone to regional insecurity. As a result of the 2012 crisis in northern Mali, caused by...

Images of Syrian children sleeping in the streets of Brussels and Belgrade illustrate the complete chaos and inhumane conditions at refugee and reception centers throughout the capital cities of Europe. One would indeed believe that Europe is...

Does the international community know how to support Malian change makers for judicial reform? Does their internal programming logic allow for this?

Although African migration is not a new phenomenon, migration from Africa to Europe has increased in recent years. What is driving these people to move to Europe right now? When answering this question it becomes clear that effective migration pol...

As the influx of migrants to Europe unfolds as the biggest humanitarian and political crisis of 2015, European policy-makers are being challenged to come up with unified responses. Currently, they mainly focus on curbing migration&n...;

Although African migration is no new phenomenon, migration from Africa to Europe has increased gradually in recent years. What is driving them to move to Europe at this moment in time? When answering this question it becomes clear that effective m...

The emergence of fragile cities poses a growing security challenge and it is time to develop innovative solutions that are embedded in informal networks.

Addressing youth unemployment has become increasingly urgent in the face of a deteriorating security situation where criminal and radical groups have penetrated many parts of Mali.

After eight months of hard talks the Algiers process resulted in a ceasefire agreement and the final draft of a peace plan on 1 March.

Please find here a categorization of research and news on the Sahel.

The beginning of 2015 has been marked by violence in many parts of Northern Mali. Most prominently in Tabankort, Kidal and Gao, but there have also been attacks in neighbouring regions. Including in the first week of March, in the capital, Ba...

Engaging with local non-state actors provides opportunities for peacebuilding, especially in places where the state is absent and solutions should be sought within communities. In the third online debate of the Knowledge Platform Security & Ru...

List of sources for conflict and context analysis frameworks, outlining organisations with their corresponding analytical frameworks

The review of 88 frameworks for doing context analysis, originating from a broad range of sectors including development, military, research, policy and economics, shows that there are four aspects of analytical models that cover the breadth and de...

In the complex contexts of fragile or conflict-affected states, where international interventions can easily influence power relations, good context analysis is crucial. Systematically mapping these contexts allows international actors to work eff...

Since 2012, Mali has been suffering from what at first seemed to be a sudden outbreak of armed conflict which eventually led to a military response by France. At that moment, the conflict was framed predominantly as a battle against the rise of ex...

For more than two years, Mali has been suffering from a sudden eruption of armed conflict. In recent decades, economic, ecological, political and security factors have combined to create fertile ground for conflict. This led to ethnic tensions and...

The importance of moving beyond Defence, Diplomacy and Development towards Fair Trade, Financial Transparency and a Firearms Treaty to achieve human security in fragile states. 

Conference report of The 24th Regular Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Geneva, Switzerland.

Talk of ‘human security’ began to be heard soon after the end of the Cold War, amidst rising violence and social breakdown in Eastern Europe and Africa.  Its emergence coincided with the rise of stabilization as an aim of Western militar...

Complexity theory sheds light on the essential role of self-organization in sustainable peace consolidation

This dossier on ‘Power dynamics and natural resources’ contains five case-study articles and a synthesis summary on the power dynamics underlying both ‘open’ and ‘hidden’ conflicts over natural resources. The dossier also comprises a debate with t...

The reality behind the game of who gets what, when and how when it comes to natural resources, reveals a power play in which deprived groups in society get the short end of the stick. It also portrays an inherent tension between environmental prot...

‘A big idea from a small country’. This is how Ecuador promoted its proposal to leave oil in the soil of Yasuní National Park in exchange for financial compensation from the international community. Yet, in August 2013– six years after its officia...

In Ghana and Ethiopia, the anticipated positive local economic effects of the cultivation of biofuel stock have been counterbalanced by disputes between local farmers and largely foreign biofuel stock companies. Land has been sold to foreign inves...

The rising production of soy for the global market has been one of the main drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. This is not only affecting the biodiversity of the Amazon region, but is also engendering severe violent conflicts in the...

Guestblogger Seth Kaplan on the rise of the g7+ group of 18 fragile and conlfict-affected states 

Guestblogger Pellini on evidence-based policy making in the debate on Syria in the British parliament.

A recent UN workshop highlighted the ‘blind spot’ of men and boys as victims of sexual violence in conflict. 

Viewing countries through an R2P paradigm requires active international support and strong US leadership

In Brazil, as elsewhere, the state has no qualms about using brutal force in defence of economic projects in the interest of capital

The HLP report does not seem far-reaching enough to put its idealistic image-sketching into practice  

The notion of sovereign equality as the foundation of the international legal order is showing creaks and squeaks.

There is chance for us to overcome the challenge of water security if we really live our lives on the basis of respect for diversity, all people and for the Earth.

UNESCO can play a vital role in guaranteeing a focus on sustainability and interrelated water challenges in the formulation of the post-2015 development agenda. 

The post-2015 agenda needs to be adapted to address the inequalities, social exclusion and root causes of poverty that people are facing. If the principles of social equity, equality and human rights are not included, we will again fail to ac...

Water security requires a different perspective towards water-use: If we don't waste it now, we will still have water in the future.

There are two critical issues in this inequality debate: there is no global benchmark for inequality and no global goals in absolute terms; and the instruments for tackling inequality lie outside traditional aid intervention models.

There is a need to consider food as human security, says Tim Siegenbeek van Heukelom. Technological problem-solving approach is no panacea as it does not truly address the root causes of hunger. 

Coincidence landed me in Williamsburg, Virginia. The pretty town serves as a proud testament to 18th century US history, as it was here, in the carefully reconstructed Capitol building and Raleigh Tavern that the American colonists became inf...

Robert Papstein taught me that famine is as much the engineered outcome of disastrous politics as the simple result of unforgiving drought

The recent and ongoing global financial crisis has shaken the confidence of many people in the trajectory and organization of global development. The effects of the 2008 crisis were experienced around the globe and its adverse impacts on human wel...

What is more important to people and societies that have gone through war - justice or peace? 

I take the tattered copy of Wild Swans from my bookcase. A business card from a hostel in Kerala reminds me that I read this during a summer in India in 1994. A year later I joined SOAS in London and was rather awed to learn that Ju...

Last night I finished reading a beautiful and gripping book, The hare with amber eyes. It’s the biography of a collection of 264 antique Japanese wood and ivory carvings.

Contemporary conflicts are very different from the conflicts of the twentieth century like the two world wars and the Cold War. Yet it has taken a long time for policy makers to realize that these ‘new wars’ require a different policy approach. Ev...

The Broker invited two eminent researchers of contemporary civil war – Mary Kaldor of the London School of Economics and Stathis Kalyvas of Yale University – to share their views on these issues. Ten years ago, Mary Kaldor wrote her ground-breakin...