Injuries due to small arms and light weapons (SALW) are common in developing countries with ongoing collective violence, or those that exist in a post-conflict state. Uganda has a long history of armed conflict, but little quantitative evidence is available about the extent of the problem of SALW. We performed a review of all injuries due to SALW at Mbale Regional Hospital in eastern Uganda for...

The war on terror is commonly characterized as a fundamentally different kind of war from more traditional armed conflict. Furthermore, it has been argued that, in this new kind of war, different rules, both moral and legal, must apply. In the first part of this paper, three practices endemic to the war on terror torture, assassination, and enemy combatancy status are identified as exceptions t...

The human migrations have been one of the motors in the history of humanity. During the twentieth century, internal forced displacement has been an important component of the migration processes in the world. Colombia, a paradigm for this phenomenon, is a country with more than three and a half million people displaced over the last 25 years by force of the violence resulting from an internal a...

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem about East and West begins with the words, “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Even today, as we live in a globalised world where rapid development have led the East and West to be highly interconnected and dependent on one another, there is a sense that East and West do not understanding each other. There have been rising tensions ...

The recent history of Guatemala is interpreted here using an interdisciplinary approach inspired by recent development and conflict studies. The author reflects on his experience in peace-building activities and uses a combination of primary and secondary sources to present the Guatemalan war as a complex political emergency. The first part (a methodological introduction) proposes an analytical...

Public health communication is the production and exchange of information to inform, influence or motivate the target audience to enable desirable, sustainable health practices at individual, community and institutional levels. This paper explores key issues relating to health communication in refugees and other displaced populations, i.e. the “hardly reached”.1 Though there are several challen...

Armed conflicts are defined as political conflicts in which armed combat involves the armed forces of at least one state or one or more armed factions seeking to gain control of all or part of the state, and in which at least 1,000 people have been killed by the fighting during the course of the conflict. Globally, the number of armed conflicts has been decreasing since 1995, when it peaked at ...

A range of seemingly rival theories attempts to explain why some individuals take extraordinary risks by choosing to participate in armed conflict. To date, however, competing accounts have typically not been grounded in systematic, empirical studies of the determinants of participation. In this paper, we begin to fill this gap through an examination of the determinants of participation in insu...