Peace and Conflict: Engineering Responsibilities and Opportunities

A Little Bit of Sugar Helps the Pill Go Down: Resilience, Peace, and Family Planning; Comment on “The Pill Is Mightier Than the Sword”

The article by Potts et al, “The Pill is Mightier than the Sword,” points out that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency, ultimately helping peacebuilding efforts. Evidence has demonstrated that family planning programs are cost effective, produce quick results, help women and couples meet their desired fertility level...

Peace-building through health: challenges and opportunities for an American NGO working with Israelis and Palestinians.

Bomb or Boon: Linking Population, People and Power in Fragile Regions; Comment on “The Pill Is Mightier Than the Sword”

The relationship between population structure and violent conflict is complex and heavily dependent on the behavior of other variables like governance, economic prospects, and urbanization. While addressing rapid population growth might be a necessary condition for peace, it is by no means sufficient. Concomitant steps must also be taken to foster inclusivity, guarantee broader rights for all, ...

On the Economic Motivation for Conflict in Africa

Conflict is not a new phenomenon in Africa-the last three decades have seen many civil wars and coups d'etat-but the last ten years or so have seen a disturbing escalation in the violence, which increasingly crosses borders. Conflicts are a complex phenomenon, but one feature does stand out: economic factors play a large role in determining the actions of actual and potential belligerents. In p...

The Differential Effects of Hope and Fear on Information Processing in Intractable Conflict

Emotional barriers have been found to play a critical role in forming attitudes and behaviors in conflict and peace-making. A major effect of such affective barriers is cognitive freezing, which reduces openness to new information and opportunities to conflict resolution. In the current research, we examined the hypothesis that hope and fear have opposite effects on information processing in su...