Social Studies

Sulu is an archipelago of some 900 islands and has been the target of an American-assisted counter-insurgency program for the past 4 years. Abu Sayyaf insurgents have been largely routed, and according to the Philippine military their numbers have been reduced to less than 300.

This is...

Desertification is one of the most important environmental challenges facing the world today, however it is arguably the most under-reported. Desertification is the gradual transformation of arable and habitable land into desert, usually caused by climate change and/or the improper use of land. Each year, desertification and drought account...

In talking about the Real IRA, the splinter group that took responsibility for the March 7 attack on an army barracks outside of Belfast that left two soldiers dead, Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde has said, "The people we are arresting are not 50 or 60 year olds from...

Fred de Sam Lazaro presents a series of reports from around the world, examining the intersections of food, food policy, and food security.

In the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks and the Obama administration's announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan, Pakistan has emerged as a central front in the War on Terror. As new leaders in Washington and Islamabad struggle against a surge of Islamic militancy and growing political instability in the...

Over the course of its 25-year conflict, Sri Lanka has been an island plagued by the abduction and disappearance of its citizens - some estimate tens of thousands. In the Eastern Province of the country—a region controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam until mid-2007 when the government...

Since 2007, an experimental Pentagon program has been sending teams of civilian anthropologists and other social scientists into the hardest-fought regions of Iraq and Afghanistan to pursue a mission that's both deeply controversial and increasingly important to U.S. military strategy.

Social scientists work within frontline combat units...

Samuel Loewenberg ventures to Guatemala to survey the underlying issues of the Central American country's extreme poverty. There, income inequality equals the worst in Africa - particularly among indigenous communities. In some regions, an estimated 75 percent of the children from infants to the ages of 6 and 7...

In Kosovo, Roma families and their children live in camps built on the biggest lead mine in Europe and next to a toxic slagheap of 100 million tons.

The global financial crisis is now reverberating deep inside the Tajikistan's mountainous countryside, where tens of thousands of Tajik men who no longer have jobs in Russia have returned to their villages. In a country already straining to accommodate Tajik refugees from Afghanistan, the government's chronic mismanagement has amplified the power and food shortages that permeate the countryside.

The 2006 election in the Democratic Republic of Congo was supposed to usher in a new period of peace and stability for the beleaguered, exhausted Congolese people. Instead, it made one of the country's most intractable problems worse. After the election, the small but powerful Tutsi community in Eastern Congo...

After six years of failed peace initiatives and continuing violence, displaced communities of Darfur are ready to fight.