Our Journeys

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.

Our Israel Senior Analyst Ofer Zalzberg joins nine leaders of Israel’s national religious community as they seek ideas for peace in meetings with the architects of Northern Ireland’s peace process. Unexpectedly, he finds the trip inspires subtle shifts in their thinking – and in his own.

Notre analyste principal, Ofer Zalzberg, a accompagné neuf responsables de la communauté sioniste religieuse d’Israël dans leur quête d’idées neuves pour la construction de la paix auprès des architectes du processus de paix en Irlande du Nord. Il est surpris de constater que ce voyage a subtilement modifié leur façon de penser – tout comme la sienne.

Our Senior Analyst for Syria Noah Bonsey visits the north east of the country to meet a Syrian Kurdish organisation that has made the region relatively secure, yet knows that it still has far to go in its struggle – particularly for long-term U.S. support.

كبير محللينا للشؤون السورية نوح بونسي يزور شمال شرق سورية للقاء منظمة كردية سورية تمكنت من تحقيق استقرار نسبي في المنطقة، رغم معرفتها بأن طريق التحديات  لا تزال طويلة جدا أمامها – خصوصاً في فيما يتعلق بالدعم الأميركي بعيد المدى.

Our Senior Analyst Claudia Gazzini travels to southern Libya and finds neglect, smugglers, a gold rush, and simmering tensions among a patchwork of ethnic, tribal and militia actors on the edge of the Sahara Desert. She also discovers much longing for a united, well-governed Libya.

Our Arabian Peninsula Senior Analyst April Longley Alley finds pride, resilience and an eagerness to end the conflict during field research and many conversations in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. She concludes that isolating one side or making the famine and suffering worse will only prolong the war.

كبيرة محللي مجموعة الأزمات لشؤون شبه الجزيرة العربية، أبريل لونغلي آلي، وجدت في خلال أبحاثها الميدانية في صنعاء، العاصمة اليمنية، الكبرياء والصمود والتوق لإنهاء الصراع؛ وتستنتج، استناداً إلى العديد من الحوارات التي أجرتها أن عزل جانب واحد في الصراع ومفاقمة المجاعة والمعاناة ستسهم فقط في إطالة أمد الحرب.

As part of Crisis Group’s research on civilian defence forces, Horn of Africa Analyst Magnus Taylor spoke to former fighters in Uganda known as the Arrow Boys. The group played an instrumental role in routing the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army when rebels attacked Teso in eastern Uganda in 2003.

As part of Crisis Group’s research into civilian vigilante groups in counter-insurgencies in Africa, Senior Research Analyst Ned Dalby went to Sierra Leone to investigate the wartime Civil Defence Forces and their core fighters, the Kamajors. For an in-depth analysis of vigilantism in the Lake Chad basin, see Watchmen of Lake Chad: Vigilante Groups Fighting Boko Haram.

Unresolved conflicts and breakaway territories divide five out of six of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership countries, most of them directly backed by the Russian Federation. But a policy of isolating the people living in these conflict regions narrows the road to peace.

Two years ago, the Cameroonian government declared war on Boko Haram. Despite some progress, the group’s violent impact is still seen and felt deeply in the remote north of the country. 

In late 2014, consultant and former Crisis Group researcher, Varvara Pakhomenko, journeyed to the northern Kazakh steppe, and the towns and villages along Kazakhstan’s Russian border, to learn more about the interwoven relationship between the Kazakh and Russian speakers of the area.