Our Journeys

Just before major battles in northern Yemen and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Crisis Group expert Peter Salisbury travelled to Marib, the government’s last stronghold. He found a region coping well with massive displacement but fearing a settlement that would favour the advancing Huthis.

A February 2019 agreement is the latest in a string of attempts to bring peace to the Central African Republic. Will it hold? Crisis Group expert Hans de Marie Heungoup goes to the country to find out, along with photographer Julie David de Lossy.

L’accord de février 2019 est le dernier d’une série de tentatives visant à apporter la paix en République centrafricaine. Va-t-il tenir ? Hans de Marie Heungoup, expert de Crisis Group, s’est rendu dans le pays pour le savoir, en compagnie de la photographe Julie David de Lossy.

Sniper fire and clashes have become rare on the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In a year that has seen positive steps to mitigate the decades-old conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, this photo essay illustrates how some Armenian front-line villagers’ lives have slowly improved.

A new communication channel has sparked hope for negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. But as Crisis Group Analyst Zaur Shiriyev found talking to Azerbaijani soldiers and villagers living near the front, decades of conflict mean that the path to peace will be rocky.

Two years ago, Crisis Group found that major threats to Colombia’s peace process with former guerrillas all intersect in the Pacific coastal district of Tumaco. Our Colombia analyst Kyle Johnson made it his mission to find out more.

Hace dos años, Crisis Group detectó que en Colombia las principales amenazas al proceso de paz con exguerrilleros se entrecruzan en el municipio de Tumaco, en la costa del Pacífico. Nuestro analista para Colombia, Kyle Johnson, asumió el reto de averiguar más

It may seem that Mexico’s crime war, which has left over 100,000 dead in its wake, could not get any worse. But interviews with gunmen in deadly Tierra Caliente show that it can, as criminal organisations break into smaller and smaller parts, driving up the death toll.

Es difícil imaginar que, con más de 100 000 muertes en su haber, la guerra criminal mexicana podría empeorar más. Pero entrevistas con sicarios inmersos en la lucha letal sobre la región de Tierra Caliente evidencian que aún no ha llegado a su límite y a medida que las organizaciones criminales se fragmentan cada vez más, el número de muertes continúa aumentando.

Ten years after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, Crisis Group’s Sri Lanka Project Director Alan Keenan and Photographer Julie David de Lossy travelled 1,500km through ex-combat zones. They found a population finding ways to cope with their traumatic experiences and an extraordinary array of monuments to the war. 

After visiting Aden with a Crisis Group team doing field research and advocacy in Yemen’s interim capital, our Yemen expert Peter Salisbury shares his images of a city struggling to get back on its feet nearly four years after Huthi forces were pushed out.

بعد زيارة عدن مع فريق مجموعة الأزمات الذي يقوم بأبحاث ميدانية وأعمال المناصرة في العاصمة المؤقتة لليمن، يعرض بيتر سالزبوري صوره التي التقطها لمدينة تصارع للعودة للوقوف على قدميها من جديد بعد أربع سنوات من إخراج قوات الحوثيين منها.

Researching the talks on forming a new Iraqi ruling coalition, our Senior Adviser for Iraq Maria Fantappie finds a country whose youth, women, civil society, officials and even politicians are hungry for bottom-up change to a stalemated, top-down system of governance. 

من خلال الأبحاث التي أجرتها مستشارتنا رفيعة المستوى لشؤون العراق ماريا فانتابييه حول المحادثات الجارية لتشكيل ائتلاف عراقي حاكم جديد، وجدت بلداً تتلهف نساؤه، ومجتمعه المدني ومسؤولوه وحتى سياسيوه لإحداث تغيير من القاعدة إلى القمة لنظامِ حكمٍ موجه من القمة إلى القاعدة وصل إلى وضع مأزوم.

Despite their traumatic history, Iraqis are finding individual and civic solutions to their country’s political failures. Crisis Group photographer Julie David de Lossy visited Baghdad in October-November 2018 and returned with portraits of its people’s search for normalcy.

Researching how Mexico can uproot the scourge of organised crime, our Senior Analyst Falko Ernst befriends a doomed hitman on the run from his past. Talking to the sicario in the Michoacán underworld, he learns much about the deadly challenges the new government faces.

In March 2018, Crisis Group’s Giustra Fellow, Tanda Theophilus, travelled for four weeks to the cities of Buea and Douala, which are at the heart of the Anglophone crisis that pits separatists against the government of Cameroon. He gauged the atmosphere in the Anglophone Southwest and Francophone Littoral regions ahead of the October presidential election.

Two and a half years after the last major fighting in the southern port city of Aden, officially Yemen’s “temporary capital”, our Arabian Peninsula Project Director April Longley Alley finds a patchwork of rival armed forces, buildings in ruins and political groups’ effective steps toward autonomy, if not outright separation.

بعد عامين ونصف العام من آخر  معركة رئيسية في عدن، المدينة الواقعة على الساحل الجنوبي لليمن، ورسمياً "عاصمته المؤقتة"، تشاهد مديرة مشروع شبه الجزيرة العربية في مجموعة الأزمات، إبريل لونغلي آلي، مجموعة متنوعة من القوات المسلحة المتنافسة، ومبانٍ مدمرة وخطوات فعلية تتخذها المجموعات السياسية نحو الحكم الذاتي، إن لم يكن الانفصال الصريح.

Embarking on field research into Pakistan’s chronic crises sixteen years ago, our South Asia Project Director Samina Ahmed was a woman in a man’s world. But her experiences persuade her that understanding conflict requires rigorously incorporating the perspectives of women and girls whose opportunities are frequently inhibited by violence.