Yemen has lost 60 percent of its per capita water availability since 1990, yet received just USD 0.60 per person in adaptation finance between 2015 and 2021.

In the gap, armed groups are regulating water, leading emergency response, and banning construction in flood corridors. The motives of these armed groups are mixed, and there are real ethical risks. But climate action doesn't need a functioning central state, and it can work if it's built on legitimacy and led by communities.

Somalia's climate finance goes almost entirely through the state, so it largely stops where government control ends. Many of the country's most climate-vulnerable communities live beyond that line, under or alongside Al-Shabaab. Drawing on 42 interviews and an archive of around 50,000 Al-Shabaab media outputs, this report examines how the group regulates trees, grazing, water and the sea, and how it responds to droughts and floods. Some of its rules protect resources. Most serve its security, revenue and control, and many close off the coping strategies households rely on when a shock hits. The report sets out four distinct operating environments, from government-held towns to areas under full Al-Shabaab control, and what adaptation programming is realistic in each.

This paper by Joshua Craze and Ferenc Dávid Markó examines the role of checkpoints in South Sudan’s political economy, challenging the view that they are simply obstacles to trade, humanitarian access and state reform. It argues that checkpoints are a central form of state authority in a country where government salaries and public services are limited, oil revenues have declined and humanitarian funding is increasingly uncertain. The paper shows that rather than representing state failure, checkpoints reflect the longstanding predatory character of state power in South Sudan, with communities themselves sometimes adopting similar systems to resist elite extraction. 

This paper is the 16th in a working paper series on Roadblocks and Revenues, a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups.

This discussion paper examines how the international order that once contained armed conflict is fracturing across multiple, simultaneous dimensions. Drawing on cases spanning Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, the Sahel, and Ukraine, the paper argues that these compounding failures have given armed groups and de facto authorities far greater freedom and resources than most analysts anticipated.

The paper identifies four cross-cutting dynamics reshaping this landscape: the breakdown of the classic patron-proxy model into fragmented, multi-patron brokerage networks; the growing economic and infrastructural power of armed groups, who now govern revenue streams, trade routes, and services independent of external backers; the retreat of international norm enforcement in favour of local, informal bargaining; and the weaponisation of misinformation to derail negotiations and access agreements. On this basis, the paper calls for a fundamental shift in how donors and practitioners approach engagement.

Al-Shabaab has spent a decade building a coherent public case against humanitarian aid. This narrative is grounded in Islamic theology, sharpened by genuine grievances about corruption and exclusion, and extended into a story of foreign domination stretching back centuries. Drawing on a database of over 50,000 Al-Shabaab media sources produced between 2016 and 2026, this report reconstructs that narrative on its own terms: not to endorse it, but to understand it well enough to engage with the populations living under it.

This research report explores the perceptions, motives, and practices of non-state armed groups and de facto authorities regarding children’s access to essential services across four case-studies: Mali, Myanmar, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Yemen.

Somali civilians have developed ways of reducing harm that formal institutions rarely see and cannot easily replicate. This paper examines those protective systems through a study of interventions led by a Somali peacebuilding organisation.

Hilary Matfess on why armed groups so often abandon wartime promises to women after peace, what Rwanda's RPF and Syria's HTS reveal about postwar gender politics, and what policymakers should do differently as patriarchal backlash intensifies.

This research report explores evidence from humanitarian and peace process support in southern Thailand and the Central African Republic, and explores whether and how humanitarian diplomacy with armed groups can advance peace without undermining humanitarian principles.

With 6.5 million Somalis facing acute food insecurity and Al-Shabaab controlling or contesting large parts of south-central Somalia, the gap between humanitarian need and humanitarian response has never been more consequential. This paper examines why the formal aid system has largely failed to reach populations in Al-Shabaab areas, and argues that the primary driver is not the group's behaviour but the system's own operational choices.

Drawing on interviews with humanitarian actors, donors and individuals close to Al-Shabaab, the paper traces how counter-terrorism frameworks, risk-averse funding models and alignment with the Somali government have entrenched an assumption that access is impossible — one the evidence does not support. It sets out a practical path forward: restoring perceived neutrality, resourcing access as a core function, and building the strategic humanitarian diplomacy needed to support the frontline engagement that is already, quietly, happening.