Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) celebrated 150 years of their mission to “protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence.” Though this mission hasn’t changed in the past century-and-a-half, the nature of conflict and crisis response has. [Video Below]

Democracy is fickle. Many of the competing theories on the best ways to foment and consolidate plural, inclusive governance or predict its rise and fall focus on political and economic forces. Yet a small group of demographers have explored population age structure as a catalyst for and reflection of a host of changes in societies that can affect governance.

The global water wars are almost upon us!

At least that’s how it seems to many. The signs are troubling: Egypt and Ethiopia have recently increased their aggressive posture and rhetoric over the construction of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the headwaters of the Blue Nile, Egypt’s major artery since antiquity. India continues to build new dams that are seen by its rival Pakistan as a threat to its “water interests” and thus its national security. Turkey, from its dominant position upstream, has been diverting the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and increasing water stress in the already-volatile states of Iraq and Syria.

During the Gezi Park protests last month in Istanbul, Turks and Kurds dismissed historical mistrust and banded together against Prime Minister Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism. Some have suggested the newly unifying cause has strengthened momentum for a long-standing solution to Kurdish autonomy and rights in Turkey. Still it may be water that the fate of Kurdish ambitions is most tied to, rather than officials in Ankara or protestors in Istanbul.

Physical, sexual, or psychological harm by a spouse or partner is a major factor in maternal and reproductive health, said Jay Silverman at the Wilson Center last month.

Silverman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cited a 15-country study of both developed and developing countries that found 25 to 75 percent of women have suffered from intimate partner violence at least once. And the effects are very significant, both in terms of the health of mothers and their children. [Video Below]

“The discovery of gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean comes at a time when world demand for energy is growing rapidly and many are questioning the reliability of supplies from North Africa and the Middle East,” said Emmanuel Karagiannis, assistant professor of Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Macedonia, in an interview at the Wilson Center.

From a demographic perspective, the global distribution of intrastate conflicts is not what it used to be. During the latter half of the 20th century, the states with the most youthful populations (median age of 25.0 years or less) were consistently the most at risk of being engaged in civil or ethnoreligious conflict (circumstances where either ethnic or religious factors, or both, come into play). However, this tight relationship has loosened over the past decade, with the propensity of conflict rising significantly for countries with intermediate age structures (median age 25.1 to 35.0 years) and actually dipping for those with youthful age structures (see Figure 1 below).