“Violent extremism remains one of Africa’s most pressing security threats. Employing asymmetric tactics and integrating within local communities, militant groups have sought to amplify grievances and intercommunal differences as a means of mobilizing recruitment and fostering antigovernment sentiments.” (Africa Center for Strategic Studies) This conversation drew on the work and expertise of two HFG grantees […]

Angélica Durán-Martínez is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Global Studies PhD program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is the author of Cocaine Smuggling: Between Geopolitics and Domestic Power Struggles (2021). Guillermo Trejo is co-author of Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico (2020), and Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Javier Osorio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Arizona. He co-authored Legacies of Resistance: Mobilization Against Organized Crime in Mexico (2020).

Dr. Chris Blattman is the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and Paths to Peace and Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago, in Harris Public Policy and The Pearson Institute.  What’s behind the war in Ukraine, and what is next? Why did the Unites States remain so long […]

Tracie L. Keesee has been a serial trailblazer.  The first African American commander in the Denver Police Department.  Denver’s first female police captain.  The first deputy commissioner for equity and inclusion in the New York City Police Department (NYPD).  And the cofounder of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization dedicated to reducing racial disparities […]

Dr. Maria (Mayte) Restrepo-Ruiz is a Research Associate with the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She completed her PhD work in the summer of 2021 titled Armed Conflict, Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Mental Health in Colombia: An Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study. “Intimate Partner Violence and Armed Conflict in Colombia” explores […]

Over the past couple of years, John Jay College professor Peter Moskos has been a prominent voice warning about the rise in violence in American cities and the potential perils of depolicing.  Moskos brings a unique point of view to the public conversation about policing: in addition to being a Harvard-trained sociologist, he spent more […]

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters took to the streets in many American cities to condemn police brutality. Some places also suffered from widespread looting and property destruction that will take years to restore.  Little of this came as a surprise to Kami Chavis, the director of the criminal […]

Dr. Godfrey Maringira is the author of Soldiers and the State in Zimbabwe and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sol Plaatje University, South Africa. Exploring the ways in which former soldiers maintain and ‘reuse’ their military training for survival, in contexts of violent inner cities with high unemployment, Dr. Maringira’s talk, “Soldiers in Exile,” […]

Beth Lew-Williams is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and US imperial ambitions […]

2021: New York City is at a crossroads moment.   After decades of decline in violent crime in New York City, recent years have seen a significant increase in homicides and shootings. The New York Police Department reported that murders in the city rose to 462 in 2020—a 45-percent increase from 2019.  The city recorded 1,531 shootings […]