This blog from King’s College London features a personal reflection by Maya Yamout, Vice President of the Lebanese NGO Rescue Me and a survivor of the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, six years after the disaster. Drawing on both her lived experience and her professional work in conflict and violence prevention, she argues that the explosion remains an ongoing crisis due to the lack of accountability for those responsible. She reflects on the lasting physical and psychological impacts on survivors, the role of civil society in preserving public memory and demanding justice, and the wider consequences of impunity for trust in state institutions and social cohesion.
This interview with King’s College London researcher Dr Rajan Basra explores the motivations behind jihadist hostage-taking during the 2014 Arsal hostage crisis in Lebanon. Drawing on interviews with families of 30 hostages, the discussion challenges conventional assumptions that kidnappings are driven solely by strategic goals such as ransoms or prisoner exchanges. Instead, it highlights the role of revenge, power and status in shaping the behaviour of militant groups and their members. The interview offers valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners working on hostage negotiations, civilian protection and conflict response, while also drawing attention to the often-overlooked experiences and support needs of victims’ families.
In this episode of Order from ashes, Peter Salisbury discusses the groundbreaking research behind Beyond the Axis, which examines how Yemen’s Houthi movement sources components and builds drones despite sustained international efforts to disrupt weapons supplies. The findings challenge conventional assumptions about arms trafficking and reveal how armed groups are adapting to an increasingly globalised war economy. Peter reflects on what this means for current conflicts in the Middle East, the limits of military responses, and how policymakers can better understand the evolving relationship between technology, supply chains and modern warfare.
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In this episode of Disorder, Jane Kinninmont is joined by Peter Salisbury to discuss how the Houthis learned to manufacture their own drones and missiles rather than simply receiving them from Iran, the outsized role China now plays in supplying the components that power this new generation of weapons, the fragile Saudi-Houthi truce since 2022, and what the changing economics of drone warfare mean for the future of arms control.
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Across conflict-affected borderlands, checkpoints are often treated as informal sites of taxation or obstruction along otherwise coherent trade routes. The TRACE project challenges this view.
Bringing together a set of comparative case studies from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, TRACE examines checkpoints as central political and economic institutions that shape how trade, authority and violence are organised. Rather than sitting on top of existing systems, checkpoints frequently constitute the infrastructure of circulation itself – enabling, regulating and transforming flows of goods, people and information.
TRACE explores the politics of circulation through detailed empirical research across diverse settings, including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Great Lakes, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, West Africa, Afghanistan and South Sudan.
Across these cases, the research highlights three broad insights:
Together, these findings push beyond state-centric frameworks and offer a new way of understanding how power operates in conflict-affected economies.
Checkpoints, not territory: rethinking conflict | Peer Schouten
This policy brief challenges conventional understandings of conflict by showing that control over circulation – rather than territory – lies at the centre of many contemporary wars. Drawing on comparative research across Yemen, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Great Lakes, South Sudan, Myanmar, and West Africa, it argues that checkpoints offer a critical but underexplored lens on conflict dynamics. In doing so, the brief highlights how these systems of control shape power, governance and everyday life, and sets out important implications for policy and programming.
Wars over checkpoints | TRACE researchers
This working paper is a collective effort taking stock of discussions during the TRACE workshop held in Entebbe, Uganda, from 19-21 November 2025. The paper unpacks the political and economic logic of checkpoints as central institutions of circulation. Drawing on comparative insights from DR Congo, Libya, Myanmar, South Sudan, Afghanistan, West Africa and Yemen, the paper advances nine theses that challenge conventional readings of roadblocks and reframe them as generative nodes of governance.
The TRACE working papers are designed not only as stand-alone contributions, but as building blocks for a broader comparative argument. Taken together, the research moves beyond describing checkpoint practices to explaining how checkpoint regimes emerge, evolve and reshape political and economic order. The following papers illustrate this collective effort, bringing together country-based studies led by individual authors whose work grounds the wider comparative insights.
On 18 June 2026, XCEPT hosted a briefing on how checkpoint economies shape conflict dynamics, governance, humanitarian access, and livelihoods across fragile and conflict-affected settings. Watch the recording of the briefing below.
The lives and livelihoods of local communities in the borderlands of the Lake Chad Basin are disrupted by both climate change and conflict, which are mutually reinforcing. Conflict undermines social cohesion and public trust and degrades the ability of communities to adapt to the effects of climate change. At the same time, climate change adds additional stress on food, land, and water security, reinforcing the political and socioeconomic conditions that drive armed conflict. In the context of a long history of marginalization, underdevelopment, and weak governance in the region, this conflux can drive people to turn to armed groups in search of alternative governance structures, economic incentives, and spiritual and social dignity and meaning.
Syria’s border with Jordan has long reflected the state of relations between the two neighbors. The border itself, delineated by France and Britain in October 1931, was tightly enforced only from 1970 onward, after the Black September crisis, when Syrian tanks entered Jordan in support of Palestinian militant organizations.
Since that time, Syria has opened and closed the Nassib-Jaber crossing—the main crossing point between the two countries—several times depending on the political relations between Amman and Damascus. The first decade of the century was something of a golden age for bilateral relations. Syria and Jordan cooperated on many fronts, especially in trade, which reached $674 million in 2007, up 166 percent from 2003. This can be seen in figures released by Jordan’s Department of Statistics, which provides the most detailed and up-to-date figures on the Jordanian economy, converted from Jordanian dinars to U.S. dollars at a rate of $1.41 per dinar. At the time, relations were such that Syria even sought to open a new crossing through Suwayda, alongside Nassib-Jaber and the crossing between Daraa and Ramtha.
In this episode of KCL Department of War Studies podcast, Dr Nafees Hamid speaks with Dr Craig Larkin, Dr Clara Voyvodic, and Maria El Sammak about the powerful and often divisive role of nostalgia in global politics.
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In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, Cedric de Coning (NUPI) sits down with Louise Lieberknecht (formerly GRID-Arendal) who is one of the authors of a new report investigating the environmental dimensions of conflict in the Lake Chad region. The authors have examined how insecurity impacts the environment and how conflict dynamics are shaped by environmental factors.
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For all the attention on conflict zones, whether through political debate, social commentary, or a flood of hot takes on social media, there is often relatively little high-quality empirical data about the experiences of people living through the conflict. How exactly are people affected by conflict and violence? How do people remember and memorialise events? Does this hold across time, geographies, and sociodemographic groups? And what does all of this mean for policies regarding, say, justice and reconciliation? Here, qualitative interviews can give rich insight.
When a peacekeeping mission transitions out of a country, it’s often the culmination of years of planning and negotiation. Indeed, modern peacekeeping doctrine requires that a peace operation include withdrawal conditions in its initial deployment plan. But at a time of financial crisis and free-falling budgets across the UN, several missions are now being forced to draw down without a transition plan in place – leaving countries without the critical protections and support they’ll need as UN peacekeepers depart.
In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, Dr Cedric de Coning from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) takes listeners into the heart of the Lake Chad region and into a two‑year research project Managing climate, peace and security risks from the borderlands of the Lake Chad. Joined by Freedom Onuoha from the University of Nigeria, and Thor Olav Iversen and Andrew E. Yaw Tchie from NUPI, they explore how the Regional Strategy for Stabilization, Resilience and Recovery (RS‑SRR) is being used to address climate‑related conflict risks.
Watch the podcast episode below, or listen on Spotify, Apple podcasts or Acast
