Climate change is increasingly recognised as a threat multiplier in agrarian societies, where erratic rainfall, fragile irrigation systems, and crop failures heighten livelihood insecurity and intensify local tensions. Deterministic accounts that portray climate change as an inevitable driver of conflict, however, often overlook community agency and the everyday practices through which households absorb environmental shocks. This article examines a traditional Javanese intercropping system, tumpangsari, as a form of social mitigation that links ecological diversification with cooperation and reciprocal labour. Drawing on comparative qualitative fieldwork in Gunungkidul Regency and Banten Province, the study shows how intercropping reduces dependence on single-crop rice harvests, distributes risk, and embeds informal mechanisms of resource sharing that diffuse grievances before they escalate into open disputes. The analysis contributes to debates on the climate - conflict nexus and environmental peacebuilding by demonstrating how locally embedded agricultural practices can redirect environmental stress towards collective risk management rather than confrontation. It also highlights the limits of such adaptation: tumpangsari often operates within patron - client hierarchies that reproduce unequal access to land and resources, producing functional stability without structural transformation.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is considered among the world's poorest countries and is possibly the poorest. Despite substantial financial assistance since a civil war erupted 10 years ago, no significant recovery can be recorded. Scholars commonly explain CAR's entrenched poverty with its status as an aid orphan, landlocked geography, unfavourable demographic profile and recurrent political crises. We provide an alternative argument after investigating peace and security, the private sector and public goods provision through combined bottom-up and top-down analysis of fieldwork, budgetary and development data. We find that rampant and continued poverty stems from a pronounced disconnect between the globally commodified market towards a locally subsistent communal economy. Politicians and foreign actors have broken their promises to the populace and continue to block the exchange of ideas and resources. The best intentions of international development actors to reform the state from the top down fail just as much as bottom-up attempts to strengthen local resilience. Rather, CAR's trajectory to prosperity depends on reconnecting the centre and peripheries, elites and general population, and the local with the global. This will require resistance against structures and agents that are (at times unknowingly) perpetuating the disconnect.
This paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate access to social protection, addressing a gap in understanding how marginalised people experience social protection in protracted crises contexts and informing more responsive system design. Uganda's multiple challenges - unemployment, poverty, weak governance, post-conflict legacies and normalised violence - undermine social protection provision and access, disproportionately affecting young women facing intersecting inequalities. While social navigation research explores agency-structure relations, it overlooks gendered and intersectional dynamics in crises. Similarly, traditional social protection approaches often position young women as passive recipients, disregarding their agency. Drawing on qualitative, participatory research with local researchers and ten marginalised young women in Teso and Karamoja as part of a larger project, we found that, despite structural constraints, young women exercise agency navigating complex structures that both facilitate and hinder social protection access. They cultivate social networks, and negotiate power imbalances through obliged tolerance, shapeshifting, resistance and avoidance. This research foregrounds young women's agency, challenges assumptions of passivity, and contributes to debates on social protection and social navigation in crises, particularly in African contexts.
Current conceptualisations of compounding crises often frame it as the convergence of large-scale contemporary disruptions - particularly climate change and violent conflict - occurring simultaneously. While valuable, these framings often neglect the temporal depth of crisis, overlooking how shocks accumulate as structural violence and neglect over generations. This paper introduces a temporal understanding of compounding crises as the historical layering of material dispossession, resource scarcity, political marginalisation, violent conflict, and ecological degradation. Building on this, resilience is reconceptualised not merely as recovery from singular shocks, but as a dual capacity: first, to adapt to long-term disruptions and endure; and second, to bear and transmit the memory of these crises across generations. Drawing from intergenerational storytelling and ethnographic vignettes in a rural village in Northern Mindanao, the paper reframes resilience as both material persistence and narrative continuity. Here, stories of endurance become emotional and strategic resources. Resilience is thus inherently intergenerational, shaped by the ability of younger generations to receive, recognise, and reinterpret inherited memories - transforming survival into an act of remembering, meaning-making, and future-making. This study situates resilience within the longue dur & eacute;e of Mindanao's colonial and postcolonial histories, combining autoethnography and intergenerational storytelling to foreground memory as both resource and burden.
Violent non-state actors (VNSAs) aligned with state interests have become prominent yet conceptually fragmented actors within contemporary security dynamics. Despite their growing importance in conflicts worldwide, scholarly and policy literature lack a coherent typology that systematically distinguishes among diverse forms of state-aligned VNSAs. This article addresses this gap by developing a new typology based on an inductive analysis of 100 empirically documented cases active between 2015 and 2025 across multiple world regions. Drawing on seven analytical dimensions including: origin, organisational structure, degree of state control, funding, functional role, motivation, and legal status, seven ideal types are identified: paramilitary units, pro-government militias, loosely state-sponsored VNSAs, auxiliary forces, state-backed self-defence groups, proxy forces, and quasi-state military companies. The typology clarifies conceptual ambiguities by integrating structural and functional variation and provides a valuable tool for comparative analysis, policy formulation, and normative assessment of state-aligned violence.
This article examines how minoritised and securitised neighbourhoods respond creatively to inflection points in prolonged violent conflict and its afterlives. Drawing on ontological security studies and the anthropology of violence, it highlights the everyday labour of coexistence and the positive role of anxiety management in securing the community. Typically, inflection points - critical occurrences that unsettle routine coexistence and test community bonds - prompt narratives to re-assert a stable "we-ness". However, based on oral histories from Kompagna Veediya, a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the article shows how long-term residents draw on their collective place-identity rather than their ethno-religious affiliations to mitigate outside scrutiny. They mobilised this place-identity in three interconnected ways: by banking on their mutigenerational history, by performing rituals of community cohesiveness and by mobilising their collective electoral power. Together, these practices draw on social capital from within, serve as a source of ontological security and as leverage in negotiating protection with security regimes. The article contributes to debates on everyday security, post-conflict urban life and the politics of recognition in divided societies.
This research aims to analyse a pattern of illiberal peacebuilding in the Sunni-Shia conflict from its emergence in 2006, through the conflict de-escalation phase, and finally its resolution in 2022. By interviewing critical actors involved in the conflict (e.g. Shia leaders, religious organisations, and local governments), we discover a pattern of conflict management within sub-national authorities under Indonesia's decentralised system of governance. Our findings show that clientelism and brokerage involving government institutions and religious actors, who played central roles as conflict resolution agents, were the most influential factors in shaping the illiberal peacebuilding outcome of the Sunni-Shia conflict. These actors, through their positions and influence, contributed to a decision-making process that was heavily shaped by political interests. Within this context, the relocation of the Shia community was chosen as a rational and pragmatic solution. The choice prioritised social stability and political expediency over reconciliation or the protection of minority rights.
At a time of increased negative effects of environmental change on human systems such as extreme meteorological events, resource scarcity, and refugee crises, it is especially pressing to understand what role environmental pressure plays in increasing the likelihood of violent conflict. We use a comprehensive measure of environmental pressure - Population Biodensity, defined as the ratio of a country's population to its biocapacity - to study the presence and intensity of conflict in a large dataset including 28 years of of observations for 181 countries, while controlling for the mediating effects of political regime and income. By means of Bayesian structural equation modelling, we found evidence of a significant relation between environmental pressure and both conflict presence and intensity. Moreover, environmental pressure was shown to be the most significant variable influencing the number of casualties in intrastate conflicts when compared to the level of democratisation and national income. These results highlight the importance of the natural environment for social sustainability, peace, and prosperity.
Finding and exploring alternatives to the use of military interventions, force and sanctions to end violent conflicts is a recurrent theme in Astri Suhrke's research. A review of the Taliban's historical background, their governance structures and practices during their two reigns in power as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan indicate both limitations and potential opportunities for engagement and shifting of policies within a negotiated rather than a militarily defined space. Drawing on Boulding's conceptualisation of power as either productive, integrative or destructive, the article discusses the extent to which the Taliban, and their Emir, succeeded in the use of threat power, economic power and integrative power rule during their 1990s reign and are succeeding presently. The article discusses external and internal efforts to influence the Emirate's restrictive policies, especially towards girls and women, and the establishment of a more permanent and inclusive governance system.
This article reports three examples among Astri Suhrke's manifold efforts to use her research and reasoning to influence intervening powers and organisations in post-conflict peace and development: explaining the concept of human security in the 1990s normative contest to redefine international humanitarian and peacebuilding interventions in a post-Cold War international system, warning the Tokyo donors' conference for Afghanistan against undermining the political agenda with their economic agenda, and demonstrating the serious statistical flaws in Paul Collier's advice on post-conflict aid and conflict recurrence after civil wars. It reflects on reasons why these efforts were unsuccessful, including the power of the World Bank, practitioners' romance with statistics, the continuing balance of international power in favour of the United States and within that context, Canada's attention to its role on the Security Council during the Kosovo conflict and NATO bombing, and the victory instead of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect and the concept of failed states. It concludes that far more lasting than these momentary battles are Astri's vast research, moral commitments, and creation and nurturing of an entire generation of younger scholars.
This article traces the emergence and evolution of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) in Baghlan Province as a US-backed, pro-government militia in post-2001 Afghanistan. By recounting an armed clash between the Jamiat-e-Islami-aligned Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Hizb-e-Islami-dominated ALP in Pul-e-Khumri city, this study examines how longstanding ethno-factional rivalries and competing claims over coercive power and resources shaped local policing and subnational governance. Marginalised in the post-2001 political order-largely due to the US military's alliance with Northern Alliance militias to remove the Taliban from power-Hizb-affiliated Pashtun commanders, many of whom had previously cooperated with the Taliban, played a central role in mobilising the ALP. Their aim was to challenge the entrenched dominance of Northern Alliance-affiliated Jamiat (Tajik) actors within provincial institutions, particularly within the ANP. While the ALP partly reinforced state authority in restive rural districts in Baghlan, its proliferation also fragmented local governance, producing parallel and competing political and security orders. Although these highly contested and volatile security arrangements temporarily helped shore up central control in insecure parts of the province, they ultimately exposed the broader dynamics of political instability in post-2001 Afghanistan - arguably foreshadowing the collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government in 2021.
Nearly two decades after the US-led intervention in Afghanistan, following a massive effort to build an Afghan state, this very state structure collapsed in August 2021, and the Taliban took control. Why did the international state-building project fail? Could it have succeeded had the approach been a different one? Taking Astri Suhrke's work as a point of departure, while also drawing on other key contributions (David Lake, Melissa Lee, Roland Paris), this article examines how the foundational dilemmas of external state-building materialised in the Afghan case, across the political, military, and economic domains. Historically, Afghan stability has rested on a balance between a weak central authority, with considerable influence resting with traditional societal actors. The US, as an external state-builder, was concerned with loyalty from a strong central power, and thereby undermined the division of power that could otherwise have gained a higher degree of legitimacy. The result is a state that was fully dependent on external support, and as the US entered a treaty with the Taliban, the Afghan state structure imploded.
Thinking and practice related to the connections between 'development' and violent conflict have evolved since the 1990s. While giving some quantitative indication of trends, this paper draws on interviews with individuals with sustained senior experience in government departments and international organisations, combined with reflections from research and teaching. The paper honours the work of Astri Suhrke who more than most has probed these themes. A narrative arc, with different strands of scholarship, debate, and practice, reflects a growing sophistication of analysis and integration of ideas and disciplines; rising confidence in outsiders' (especially Western agencies') ability to 'solve' apparently internal conflicts in low- and middle-income countries; a series of failures and a crisis of faith, above all in the 'liberal peace' and possibly also in 'development'; a big change in the geo-political context; and key areas where ideas, and ways of thinking, are shifting, though policy-oriented organisations may not be catching up. Sub-plots include identifying gaps, highlighting areas where analysis and practice may intensify in coming years, and the eternal quest for effective systems of classification.
This article reflects upon understandings of war, gender and women's rights activism in Afghanistan and their consequences. It explores how efforts to 'write against' the imperial capturing of women's liberation in the context of the war on terror have eclipsed - and to some extent, provided frameworks seized upon to de-legitimise - the actors working to advance gender equality inside Afghanistan. It contrasts the flattening preoccupations with 'saving Afghan women' as a project of imperial warfare with the actual diversity of approaches and priorities existing within the women's movement, showing the nuances with which Afghan women activists analysed and approached obstacles to gender equality in their communities. We suggest that although different activist groups, to various degrees, made use of international resources and interventions, they cannot be reduced to them. Yet, we trace how this was exactly what happened as geopolitical priorities shifted and NATO countries sought closer alignments with the Taliban. At that point, women activists found themselves dismissed as elitist, pro-war and fundamentally unauthentic to the Afghan context, in ways that would echo the claims of Taliban discourse.
Astri Suhrke observed in 2013 that 'the process of defining the Afghan state will continue and, as with most state-building processes, is likely to involve an element of violence'. This proved prescient when the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Drawing on Suhrke's extensive work, this paper analyses the new Taliban state as an endogenous state-building project emerging from a victor's peace, rather than solely a case of rebel rule or regime survival. Using four dimensions of state formation - coercion, capital, legitimacy, and leadership - it examines how the Taliban have consolidated authority through coercive control, religious-ideological framing, symbolic performance, and a post-aid political economy. The second Emirate is presented as a distinct formation: neither a revival of the 1990s order nor a continuation of the Islamic Republic, but a clerical, centralised state shaped by two decades of insurgency and the perceived failures of externally driven models. While stabilising core functions under sanctions and isolation, enduring tensions between centralisation and local realities, ideological rigidity and pragmatic adaptation, may undermine long-term stability.
