According to The Economist, one similarity between seemingly dissimilar Gaza and Kenya is that they both have “too many young men without either jobs or prospects.” Improvements in health and education—which resulted in more current 15-to-24-year-olds being healthy and relatively well-educated—have not been matched by sufficient growth of economic opportunities, leaving many young people frustrated in their attempts to provide for themselves and their families. Fertility rates have fallen somewhat in both places, from around seven children per woman 20 years ago to approximately five today—but this is still far higher than the 1.6 children per woman average in developed countries.

For a more detailed analysis of the relationships between large youth cohorts and conflict, see Population Action International’s report The Shape of Things to Come. As report author Elizabeth Leahy noted at the Wilson Center in October 2007, “The problem is not that there are too many young people, but that there are too few opportunities and resources available to them….Young people are the most important asset a society has in looking to the future. When young people are educated, healthy, and employed, they are the ones who renew and revitalize a country’s economy and institutions.”

“After decades of mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation, African farmers—still overwhelmingly smallholders working family-tilled plots of land—are awakening from a long slumber,” writes G. Pascal Zachary in the Winter 2008 issue of the Wilson Quarterly. In “The Coming Revolution in Africa,” Zachary argues that sub-Saharan Africa’s small-scale farmers—who constitute 60 percent of the region’s population—are making important gains that could transform them into key economic and political players in their countries.

Lacking adequate protein in their diet, refugees in Tanzania are eating chimpanzees and other endangered species, says a report by the international wildlife conservation group TRAFFIC, a joint project of the World Wildlife Fund and the World Conservation Union (IUCN). “Relief agencies are turning a blind eye to the real cause of the poaching and illegal trade: a lack of meat protein in refugees’ rations,” said George Jambiya, the lead author of the report, which urges humanitarian agencies to supply refugees with legal, sustainable wild meat.

Hostility between the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) and the country’s government—brewing since government officials announced a sharp increase in mining project commitments in the northern region of Niger in early 2007—escalated this month. Violence reached Niger’s capital city of Niamey for the first time on January 8, 2008, when a landmine exploded under a car, killing a local radio director. The MNJ, which decries what it perceives as the unequal distribution of profits from uranium mining and oil drilling in Tuareg territory, has killed nearly 50 soldiers since early last year, earning the wrath of the Nigerien government. Although the group vehemently denies any involvement with the January 8 attack, many in Niger are skeptical of this claim.

In its mission to prevent conflict in Africa, the new U.S. military combatant command in Africa (AFRICOM) will likely address the environmental dimensions of conflicts, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan told Inside the Pentagon (subscription required). “To the extent that the Africa Command in its management of our capability and capacity-building training programs enables African forces to be more effective in deterring conflicts, defusing conflicts, responding to local flare-ups that might occur because of some environmentally caused issue—then, yes, you could say that AFRICOM is part of the process of addressing the consequences of environmental change,” said Whelan. She noted that shifting weather patterns and sustained drought helped precipitate the current conflict in Darfur between pastoralists and farmers—echoing an argument UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made in a June 2007 editorial in The Washington Post.

A transcript of an October 2007 interview Whelan gave on AFRICOM is available here. In a New Security Beat post, Department of the Army Senior Africa Analyst Shannon Beebe argues that AFRICOM should implement an environmental security strategy.

A story in yesterday’s New York Times describes an expanding campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kikuyu tribe in western Kenya. We’ve seen this story before. In my 2006 book States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, I explained how rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and historical land grievances collided with multi-party elections in the early 1990s to provide opportunities for Kenyan elites to gain power and wealth by violently mobilizing ethnic groups against one another. The ensuing violence pitted the Kalenjin and other smaller tribal communities engaged in pastoral activities against the Kikuyu, Luo, and other traditional farming communities in the fertile Rift Valley, leaving more than a thousand Kenyans dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Sound familiar? Demographically and environmentally induced ethnic land competition—at the heart of the 1990s conflicts—remains problematic today. Deep-seated grievances emanating from struggles over scarce farmland provide ample opportunities for elites across the political spectrum to mobilize tribal supporters to engage in violence and ethnic land cleansing during times of electoral instability—especially in rural areas, where strong group identification facilitates such mobilization. This didn’t happen during the last presidential election, in 2002, because elites bought into the democratic process and the elections were viewed as fair. In addition, the Kenyan Electoral Commission and the international community, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the strife in 1992 and 1997, closely scrutinized electoral behavior in 2002.

This time, the apparent rigging of the election by the Kibaki regime—which many minority tribes view as having used its political power to unfairly benefit its own Kikuyu tribe—unleashed the latent grievances against the Kikuyu still present in Kenyan society. “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic,” Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, told the Times. “They are political…they go back to land.”

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a regular ECSP contributor.

More evidence against treating natural resource management as a luxury item in post-conflict settings comes from the November edition of the New Agriculturalist. Seven short pieces on agriculture after conflict highlight the necessity of utilizing agriculture as part of a post-conflict recovery strategy.

I recently traveled to Ethiopia to attend “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa,” a conference sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and LEM Ethiopia. The conference was attended by more than 200 development practitioners from around the world, including many from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.