Marisa O Ensor

Georgetown University | GU · Program on Justice and Peace

Often compounding each other, current trends including climate change, environmental degradation, and increased consumption associated with unsustainable development and population growth, present serious threats to human security at global, national, and local levels. These trends are destabilizing economies, negating development gains, exacerbati...

This article examines the links between gender, mass violence, climate change, and displacement in South Sudan. I argue for risk-informed gender-sensitive strategies that incorporate local capacities and sources of resilience. When civil war engulfed South Sudan again in 2013, egregious human rights violations, including sexual and gender-based vio...

The literature on the security implications of climate change, and in particular on potential climate-conflict linkages, is burgeoning. Up until now, gender considerations have only played a marginal role in this research area. This is despite growing awareness of intersections between protecting women's rights, building peace and security, and add...

Exacerbated by the adverse effects of climate change, conflicts over natural resources are among the greatest challenges in 21st-century geopolitics. These conflicts present serious threats to human security at both the national and local levels. Natural resources and environmental governance can nonetheless serve as a vehicle for peace if managed...

Water deprivation is increasingly recognized as a political and security problem. Tensions resulting from the growing imbalance between global water demand and supply can escalate into conflict. The UN estimates that at least one-quarter of the world's population will live in water-scarce regions by 2050. In 2001, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Ann...

The East African Community (EAC – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda) is home to some of the greatest water sources in the world. These include Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria and the Nile River Basin. The distribution of water varies significantly within the EAC; some areas often experience a rain surplus (e.g. Burundi, Rwanda...

Enduring violence, climate change and other environmental crises force people in South Sudan to flee their home towns. Women and girls face gender-specifc challenges and opportunities as they seek to cope with new environments and changing social structures.

“We’re fighting for our lands, for our water, for our lives,” said an indigenous woman from Colombia, describing her work as an environmental defender. She spoke at a December 2019 workshop on Gender, Peace and the Environment held in Bogotá, Colombia, that brought together social, environmental, and legal scholars and practitioners—including indig...

Egypt’s rapid population growth and extreme water scarcity make the country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The country’s long Mediterranean coastline is already experiencing the consequences of sea level rise, including saltwater intrusion, soil salinization and deterioration of crop quality. In a country where 95 percent of fr...

The recent proliferation of international activity on youth, peace and security (YPS) has been motivated by demographic imperatives – today’s generation of youth is larger than it has been at any other time in human history – as well as geopolitical realities – more than 600 million of those youngsters live in conflict-affected regions. As the conc...

Balancing transitional societies’ need for justice against the best interests of children and youth is a difficult endeavor. The displacement of young people who, unaccompanied or with their families, are forced by conflict and human rights violations to flee their homes and communities represents an additional challenge in societies seeking to tra...

Balancing transitional societies’ need for justice against the best interests of children and youth is a difficult endeavor. The displacement of young people who, unaccompanied or with their families, are forced by conflict and human rights violations to flee their homes and communities represents an additional challenge in societies seeking to tra...

September 12, 2019 marks one year since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and former Vice President-turned-opposition leader Riek Machar signed a new peace agreement. The human and environmental cost of the five-year war it ended has been staggering. Women and girls have often borne the brunt of the violence. Fighting and displacement have also pl...

Climate change is being increasingly framed as a security issue—a “threat multiplier” that can amplify the risks of breakdowns in peacefulness. Yet, even extreme climate hazards do not always lead to higher levels of violence. For the first time since the Institute for Economics and Peace began producing the Global Peace Index in 2007, the 2019 G...

The case of South Sudan can be seen as representative of a broader pattern of the convergence of climate change, resource scarcity, and insecurity. Current projections of climate change suggest that the region will become more arid, experience longer dry seasons, and become more prone to drought, exacerbating the factors that drive conflicts over a...

This paper discusses the securitization of the discourse and policies framing the realities of young refugees in Africa. Drawing on an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School Securitization Theory, I argue that current tendencies to examine young refugees’ experiences of political violence and displacement through a security le...

While homicides have slowly declined (SDG 16.1.1) and more citizens around the world have better access to justice (SDG 16.3), high-intensity conflicts and various manifestations of political violence (SDG 16.1.2) have increased in recent years. Violent extremism – here defined as support for or perpetration of acts of violence with the purpose of...

While the horrific violence and associated displacement of millions of Syrians remain the focus of worldwide attention, the crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) has been unfolding with far less visibility. Yet current figures suggest that more than one in five of CAR’s 4.9 million inhabitants have been displaced and nearly half of the popul...

Wartime violence and displacement are deeply gendered and generational processes that affect girls and boys differently from one another and from their adult counterparts. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and returnees in South Sudan, this chapter examines the multiple ways in which gender shapes local realiti...

Counterterrorism policymakers and practitioners increasingly focus on developing a more effective strategic approach to address violent radicalization. This has been reflected in the emergence of the policy and practice of “countering violent extremism” (CVE). The growing salience of CVE-related initiatives is accompanied by a keen interest in unde...

The concept of “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) has become central to the security policy of governments around the world. Yet despite the near-ubiquity of the term there is widespread disagreement over what the concept means. The rise of the concepts of “violent extremism” (VE) and CVE has caused much discussion within peacebuilding communitie...

Given the very high proportion of children and youth among displaced populations worldwide, and the particular challenges and opportunities they must confront, their experiences, needs and aspirations must be investigated and factored into relevant policy and practice. Conceived as a follow up to the earlier Children and Migration: At the Crossroad...

During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), millions of refugees fled the south of the country seeking shelter in one of the sprawling camps in neighbouring African nations. Many of them were children, often unaccompanied minors who had been orphaned or separated from their relatives during the war. Some of them arrived in the U.S. as refugee...

This report describes an interim data gathering process conducted in Burundi and Chad in 2015. The research focused on community efforts to protect children and build social cohesion in countries undergoing conflict or in post conflict settings. The report is a precursor to capacity building tools that will aim to strengthen social cohesion by rein...

This concluding chapter critically evaluates existing strategies aimed at providing short-, intermediate-, and long-term durable solutions for migrant children and youth identified by the contributors to this book. The discussion is intended to heighten policymakers and practitioners’ understanding about the experiences of child migrants and to ide...

Ensor and Goździak open this book by outlining the most salient themes emerging in the current wave of international interest in children during forced migration. Scholarship, policy, programming, and advocacy efforts undertaken on behalf of these youngsters and their families have remained fragmented, with forms of child displacement often treated...

This chapter discusses the repatriation, reintegration, and renewed forced displacement experienced by the young population of South Sudan in response to the successive episodes of political violence that continue to ravage their country. It focuses on the role played by displaced young girls and boys as they find themselves differentially situated...

Often described as ‘the future of the nation’, children in South Sudan represent the promise of a stable positive national identity in this conflict-ridden, newly independent African country. State- and nation-building efforts in the post-independence period have similarly targeted the members of the youngest generations, at least at the discourse...

A condition that marks the lives of millions of people throughout the world, conflict-induced displacement often results in social ruptures and dislocation for affected women, children, and men; it may also open up possibilities of subverting gender and generational inequalities, leading to the emergence of transformed social hierarchies. Katarzyna...

As wartime inhabitants, female children have often been presented as paradigmatic non-agents, victims of a toxic mixture of violent circumstances and oppressive cultural practices. Child-and gender-sensitive approaches, on the other hand, have embraced a more balanced recognition of displaced girls' active, if often constrained, efforts to cope wit...

The protection of children confronting adversity has become one of the central priorities of humanitarian interventions worldwide. The array of child-focused rights and protections established by international, regional and national frameworks provides a normative foundation guiding efforts to facilitate the (re)establishment of more secure conditi...

Refugees occupy an ambiguous position in contemporary nation-states. From a normative standpoint, their experience is defined by persecution and the crossing of national borders. The disruption of place-based notions of identity — of settling in a new place without belonging to it — associated with forced displacement often leads to a sense of perm...

This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities faced by youth as active participants in processes of postconflict justice and reconciliation in Africa. I draw on field data from South Sudan and Uganda, two countries emerging from decades of brutal and interrelated civil war where youngsters often bore the brunt of the violence. Quali...

Peacebuilding efforts in Africa have run the gamut from curricular changes explicitly incorporating peace education pedagogy, to national and internationally sponsored transitional justice processes, to the popular use of drama, poetry, song, painting, and other forms of artistic expression. Contemporary realities across the African continent revea...

The tension inherent in the juxtaposition of children's right to participation and to protection is most starkly manifested in the context of armed conflict. The possibility that children may not only choose to participate in military structures, but actually derive some benefits from such participation must be seriously considered. Failure to adeq...

This report presents the ndings of a research project on the reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) returning to South Sudan since the signing of the 2005 Peace Agreement, an internationally mediated accord that marked the end of Africa’s longest-running civil war in recent history and paved the way for the secession of t...

More than a decade and a half ago, Donal Cruise-O’Brien (1996) declared African children and youth to be “a lost generation.” His concern was echoed by later scholarship in acknowledgment of the enormous socioeconomic and political forces still surrounding the lives of young people in Africa (Abbink and Van Kessel 2005; Honwana and De Boeck 2005),...

With 70% of its people under the age of 30, and approximately 147 million children under the age of five (UNICEF 2008, 49), Africa1 is the world’s youngest continent. Informed understandings of the implications of this so-called African “youth bulge” have been hampered by the shortage of detailed research on the issue. Inquiry into the lives and so...

With 70% of its people under the age of 30, and approximately 147 million children under the age of five (UNICEF 2008, 49), Africa1 is the world’s youngest continent. Informed understandings of the implications of this so-called African “youth bulge” have been hampered by the shortage of detailed research on the issue. Inquiry into the lives and so...

Groundbreaking and provocative, Wars, Guns, and Votes presents Paul Collier's efforts to bring empirical rigor to an examination of the role of democracy in the world's most impoverished nations. Governments in these countries of "the bottom billion," as Collier termed them in an earlier book, need to become more accountable, as electoral competiti...

Gretchen E Schafft is contributing editor of “Human Rights Forum,” the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News. Keywords: disaster, human rights and advocacy, children and youth, Haiti, Caribbean

Children and Migration offers a comprehensive analysis of the increasingly common phenomenon of child migration from the perspective of the children themselves. Situating child migration at the nexus of resiliency and vulnerability, the volumefocuses on the local conditions that frame child migrants' lives as well as analyzes thebroader issues of p...

Responding to the challenges and opportunities presented by the accelerating pace of human mobility, studies and interventions guided by different conceptualizations of childhood and children have increasingly focused on the youngest participants in this global trend. These perspectives range from earlier assumptions of the universality of childhoo...

At the beginning of the second decade of the 3rd millennium, the global forces that have propelled the increasing pace of human mobility show no signs of abating. In 2005, there were some 191 million international migrants worldwide, nearly two-and-a-half times the figure in 1965 (UN DESA, 2006). In 2008, only three years later, the number of inter...

In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, migration has become a powerful social force affecting families and individuals of all ages. The precise number of migrant children is unknown, but commentators have argued that “in some countries the percentage of young people migrating can be as high as 50 percent” (Dall’Oglio, 2008: 1). A Worl...

The Legacy of Hurricane Mitch offers a comprehensive analysis of the immediate and long-term consequences of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and environmental assessments, this volume illustrates the importance of adopting an approach to disaster research and practice that places "natural" trigger events wi...