GECHS

The Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) will host its Third Annual Workshop at the Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, on 10-11 December, 2007. This workshop will focus on the relationship between micro-level conflict processes and institutions. Professor Scott Gates, Director of the Centre for the Study of Civil War at PRIO, Oslo, will deliver the keynote speech. Download the Call For Papers. Closing date: 30 September 2007.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has recently begun talking about the challenge of ‘climate security’, and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that “Global climate change must take its place alongside the threats of conflict, poverty and the proliferation of deadly weapons that have traditionally monopolized first-order political attention”. Climate change poses clears risks to Australia’s interests in trade, aid and political stability in Asia. This not inconsiderable risk poses some complex challenges to Australian foreign policy. GECHS SSC member Jon Barnett has recently published a policy note exploring the risks climate change poses to security in Asia and the options for Australian foreign policy. [Download PDF, 172 k]

Two policy briefs written by GECHS SSC member Patricia Kameri-Mbote are now available from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In the newest brief of the Navigating Peace series of the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), Kameri-Mbote lays the historical foundation of water management in the Nile River Basin, and recommends policies for facilitating cooperation among the region’s many water users. In her second brief, published by the Africa Program, she argues that rather than being a source of competition, Africa’s dependence on natural resources can facilitate dialogue and provide a pathway to peacebuilding in the troubled Great Lakes Region.

GECHS Associate Siri Eriksen and IPO staffer Kirsten Ulsrud, along with co-authors Jeremy Lind and Bernard Muok, have published a policy brief for the African Centre for Technology Studies on the “Urgent Need to Increase Adaptive Capacities”. The article presents new research on the interactions between conflicts and climate change adaptation, and makes recommendations for actions to assist the adaptation and development process of people in a constant state of crisis. The findings are derived from a three-year project on climate adaptation as a livelihood struggle among dryland populations in Kenya. [Download the policy brief]