The political resource curse posits that newly resource-rich states risk experiencing authoritarianism and conflict. This article examines Guyana as a most-likely case of that phenomenon. Drawing on interviews and quantitative indicators, we find that oil has not driven the recent democratic backsliding and rising geopolitical tensions. Instead, Guyana’s democratic fragility stems from winner-take-all electoral institutions in a context of deep ethnic polarisation and major parties’ limited normative commitment to democracy. Regarding conflict, Venezuela’s domestic politics, not oil, is the key driver of regional tensions. We therefore argue that the political resource curse framework may at times obscure more than it reveals, misattributing long-standing political tensions to resource wealth. Domestic and international political dynamics may be better understood as ‘politics with resources’ than politics cursed by oil. Promoting electoral reform, fostering stronger commitment to democratic norms within political parties and ensuring credible deterrence may therefore matter more than technocratic resource governance.

The general purpose of this article is to investigate how conflict and struggle, observed in history and experienced in one’s own being, might serve to bolster faith. Two areas are of particular significance regarding the strengthening of faith vis-à-vis conflict: facilitating assent to religious truth claims and renewing catechetical approaches. Concretely, this article is comprised of three sections. The first section briefly elucidates the terms ‘catechesis’, ‘conflict’, and ‘struggle’. The second section provides an overview of Newman’s religious epistemology and analyzes how it conceives of struggle in the process of coming to assent and certitude regarding religious truth claims, primarily treating Newman’s major 1870 work on religious epistemology, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. The third section then analyzes how conflict and struggle are being incorporated into a variety of cognate disciplines to improve student engagement and outcomes. Case studies demonstrate the potential fruit of being forthright regarding the struggles of major figures in history, as well as the value of introducing students to manageable levels of confusion and responsibility for course content. The conclusion offers several constructive reflections while not shying away from the pitfalls that accompany any incorporation of conflict and struggle into the catechetical process.

This article examines the ways in which three communities in South-West Colombia understand ‘security’ and the practices they adopt in pursuit of it. Building on the burgeoning literature on vernacular security, we show the centrality of territorio as the key referent object of security in the region, and a wide variety of collective efforts adopted by communities in pursuit of securing their territorios. Through this, we make three contributions to the vernacular security literature. Methodologically, we show that Participatory Action Research (PAR) can be a powerful tool for identifying and understanding vernacular concepts and practices of security. But more than this, PAR can also play a role in helping to build and sustain community-level collective security practices, bridging research and action. Empirically, we bring vernacular security analysis to a region that, to date, has not been examined, documenting discourses and practices of security that are radically different from those that have dominated (Western) security studies. Conceptually, we show how understandings and practices of security in the region draw directly upon indigenous, mestizo and Afro-Colombian cultures, histories, and epistemologies – and in many respects do not conform to Western security registers that are too often assumed to be universal. This reiterates the importance of PAR, which can help researchers avoid (unwittingly) perpetuating Western-centric assumptions about what visions of security communities are trying to achieve and how they pursue those objectives.

The ongoing conflict in Sudan, which began in April 2023, has triggered a severe but under-recognized mental health crisis. Nearly two-thirds of hospitals in conflict-affected regions are non-functional, supply chains have collapsed, and fewer than 100 psychiatrists serve a population of 45 million. Emerging evidence documents rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety among displaced and non-displaced civilians, children, and health workers, yet mental health remains systematically neglected in humanitarian response. This commentary examines the gap between global commitments—including the Sustainable Development Goals and WHO’s Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP)—and the realities of care in conflict settings. Drawing on lessons from Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, we outline a 6-priority framework for immediate mental health integration: (1) training lay health workers for task-shifted psychological support; (2) rebuilding essential psychiatric infrastructure; (3) establishing protected humanitarian corridors for psychotropic medications; (4) expanding tele-psychiatry and remote counselling; (5) integrating mental health into primary and emergency care; and (6) addressing stigma through community engagement. We argue that without explicit funding allocations and operational mandates for mental health services, post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding in Sudan will remain compromised. We call on donors to allocate at least 10% of health-related humanitarian aid to mental health initiatives and for WHO and UNICEF to embed mhGAP in all emergency responses. Sudan represents both an urgent crisis and a global warning: mental health can no longer remain the invisible dimension of humanitarian emergencies.

Violent upheavals in landownership following conquest often change not only the concentration of land across individuals, but also the inequality of its distribution between groups. We argue that variation in landowners’ group identity has important implications for the provision of local public goods. We test this claim by studying the aftermath of the Cromwellian Settlement in seventeenth-century Ireland. Leveraging the lottery-based allocation of expropriated Catholic land to distinct groups of English Protestants, we find significant local variation in the extent of Protestant landownership. Drawing on rich original data, we find fewer local public goods in the long run in areas with more Protestant elites, with the largest reductions in goods that were either directly elite-funded or disproportionately benefited the Catholic majority. The results illustrate how conquest reshapes not just institutions but also long-run local inequalities, and highlight the distinct consequences of between-group inequality for the provision of public goods.

Research on psychology and foreign policy offers compelling evidence that leaders’ predispositions to aggression influence their decisions to initiate military conflicts. However, most indicators of leader proclivities are limited both spatially and temporally, reducing their generalizability. To mitigate these issues, this study employs the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR), a measure of aggression drawn from theories of evolutionary psychology, and available for most leaders in the post-World War II era. FWHR not only provides broad coverage but it also taps into a dimension of leader characteristics overlooked in most international conflict research. Empirical analysis of over 1,700 leaders across 174 countries during 1947–2010 reveals that higher-FWHR leaders are significantly more likely than their lower-FWHR counterparts to initiate conflict. The results are particularly strong early in a leader’s tenure.

This paper focuses on the bottom-up process of nation formation in multiethnic empires. The key idea is that nations emerge from a conflict over economic, political, and other resources. Under specific conditions, these conflicts give rise to coalitions based on shared ethnicity. The nation emerges if the number of ethnic-based coalitions is sufficiently large. We identify the following conditions for nations to emerge: the existence of conflict, a locally heterogeneous population, and the salience of shared ethnicity. We apply this model to account for the emergence of the Czech nation in the late Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole party is routinely depicted as an unusually harmonious and high-performing team. This article re-examines that assumption by returning to the only contemporary sources that intermittently record interpersonal strain during the Pole march: the diaries of Sverre Hassel and Olav Bjaaland. Using a deliberately narrow empirical base and a transparent inclusion procedure, the study restricts all claims about friction to what the diarists explicitly note. A minimal coding vocabulary—task, process/authority, and relationship/tone—serves as an organising device rather than an explanatory framework. Seventeen diary passages document irritation, disagreement, reprimand, sarcasm, or social sanction linked to identifiable expedition members. Read conservatively, the diaries neither support a counter-myth of dysfunction nor permit inferences about the prevalence or long-term significance of conflict. They do, however, make one conclusion difficult to avoid: the Pole march cannot responsibly be described as frictionless simply because it succeeded logistically or was later narrated smoothly. Instead, the diary evidence shows that operational excellence coexisted with domain-specific frictions—over judgement, rations, navigation, role allocation, and tent-life tone—and that authority and contradiction repeatedly appear as interactional fault lines. Cohesion, where it existed, was not the absence of strain but a condition under which strain could still be written down.

This article introduces the global Women’s Safety Index (WSI), outlining its rationale, purpose, and potential applications. The Index consist of three dimensions: Equity, Protection, and Resources, identified as foundational to women’s safety. Key indicators within each dimension are selected based on theoretical relevance and empirical evidence. We detail the statistical methodology and framework used to construct the Index and present validation analyses demonstrating its ability to capture changes in women’s safety, particularly in response to external disruptions. The WSI is available on an interactive digital platform, enabling users to explore, visualize, and compare women’s safety data across regions and over time.

With nearly one in six children globally living in conflict zones, evidence-based mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is crucial. This systematic mapping review with narrative synthesis followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines to synthesize fifty-six studies examining in-country interventions for conflict-affected youth under 25 from 1990 to 2025. The studies were mostly conducted in the global South and utilized various methods, including Teaching Recovery Techniques, trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, and school-based programmes.

The findings were mixed. While twenty-five studies reported positive outcomes regarding post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), anxiety and social functioning, the effects often diminished over time, and long-term data (>6 months) remains scarce. The review identified three critical success factors: multilayered stepped-care models, task-sharing with trained lay workers, and family engagement. To be effective, cultural adaptation and age-appropriate tailoring were essential; efforts in this regard ranged from play-based interventions for younger children to structured therapies for adolescents.

The evidence base is limited by methodological heterogeneity and short follow-up periods. To bridge the research–practice gap, future efforts must prioritize longitudinal evaluations and stronger collaboration between researchers and humanitarian actors to ensure that interventions effectively mitigate the long-term impacts of conflict.