The ongoing famine in war-prone Somalia has led to much speculation about the link between violent conflict and food insecurity. Some commentators have also connected this year’s political revolutions ...

Since pre-Hispanic times, a co-evolutionary relationship built around management of biocultural resources with the mountain environment in Cusco Valley, Peru, has produced the ayllu mindset. While ...

Megha Amrith is a Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility in Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of ...

Jared Diamond famously stated that “the biggest problems facing the world today are not at all beyond our control, rather they are all of our own making, and entirely in our power to deal with” when ...

May 2023 — With the launch of the new United Nations University (UNU) global website platform, Our World has been integrated into the UNU website and will shift to become a curated collection of UNU's ...

Patricia Gualinga stands serenely as chaos swirls about her. I find this petite woman with striking black and red face paint at the head of the People’s Climate March in New York City on 21 September ...

Globally today, we are witnessing an “inexorable intensification of violence” in the world’s armed conflicts. The result is that there are currently 59.5 million refugees worldwide. And among that ...

A famous anecdote describes a scheme the British Colonial Government implemented in India in an attempt to control the population of venomous cobras that were plaguing the citizens of Delhi that ...

The video brief accompanying this article, produced by the UNU Media Studio’s Kaori Brand, introduces two entrepreneurs who employ both traditional knowledge and scientific advancement to support the ...

Waste not, want not. Unfortunately, this old adage has been overshadowed by a growing torrent of global demand for the latest and greatest consumer gadgets. Rapid technological advances, expanding ...

Since the end of the cold war, the United Nations Security Council has articulated its responses to many crises of international peace and security through the use of sanctions. The Council currently ...

A whopping two-thirds of human conversation is gossip about others — a rate that holds true, anthropologists say, for radically different cultures around the world. Something like 90 percent of that ...