This paper examines how Sudanese civilians, facing widespread violence from the ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have been compelled to negotiate survival strategies with warring factions. This report highlights the shift in Sudan’s power struggle, which has devolved from a national conflict into highly localized battles, particularly in Darfur. In response, local community leaders and power brokers have facilitated fragile truces to provide temporary protections, allow for trade, and secure safe passage for civilians.

Although the aid sector often treats corruption and diversion as an anomaly, they are pervasive, systemic and often unwittingly perpetuated by standard aid sector practices. Drawing primarily on evidence from Somalia and Afghanistan (with reference to other contexts), this paper explores the specific aid practices that enable and perpetuate corruption and diversion, and what donors and implementers should be doing differently.

This “review of reviews” looks at how and what Western governments and international organisations have tried to learn from the intervention in Afghanistan.

This paper examines life under jihadist groups like JNIM in Mali, looking at the different survival strategies civilians employ.

Based on extensive research in Al-Shabab controlled areas of Somalia, this paper explores dynamics between Al-Shabab and those who live under their control.

Part of a larger research programme hosted by the Geneva Graduate Institute, this study examines the Taliban insurgency’s practice and attitudes toward IHL rules and human rights norms.

Prevailing understandings of control – which focus on territorial dividing lines and acts of violence – are incomplete. Our paper argues that armed group control should instead be broken down according to how armed groups seek to influence populations.

Part of a larger research programme hosted by the Geneva Graduate Institute, this study examines MNLA practice and attitudes toward IHL rules and human rights norms.