Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

The 2011-12 West African food crisis led to riots in Senegal and Burkina Faso as well as food insecurity for millions of rural and urban poor across the region. The crisis emerged from a number of factors, including instability in northern Mali, increases in global food prices, and low rainfall in the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 growing seasons. Many countries in the region are now reassessing and expanding domestic agricultural capabilities. At the top of the agenda for Senegal, a democratic republic on track to reach many Millennium Development Goals, is reducing youth unemployment and increasing domestic agricultural capacity.

Several high-profile reports in the last few months have suggested that climate change and natural resource scarcity contributed to the events that have rocked the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since December 2010. Thomas Friedman is apparently working on a Showtime documentary about the topic. But what exactly was the role of environmental factors in the mass movement?

Once considered a model for Sahelian democracy, Mali’s liberal regime (assessed as “free” in Freedom House’s annual survey of democratic governance continuously from 2000 to 2011) virtually disintegrated in March 2012 when a group of junior army officers, frustrated by the central government’s half-hearted response to a rebellion in the state’s vast northern tier, found themselves – somewhat accidently – in control of the state.

The New York Times had a front-page story on Egypt’s population policy last week; unfortunately it wasn’t a sterling example of how to report on this tricky issue and left out a key part of the story – the important role of family planning in ensuring human rights, especially for women.

Stretching across northern Africa, the Sahel is a semi-arid region of more than a million square miles covering parts of nine countries. It is home to one of the world’s most punishing climates; vast expanses of uncharted and unmonitored desert; busy migration corridors that host human, drug, and arms trafficking; governments that are often ineffective and corrupt; and crushing poverty. It is not surprising then that the area has experienced a long history of unrest, marked by frequent military clashes, overthrown governments, and insurgency.

In “On Demographic and Democratic Transitions,” published in the February edition of Population and Development Review, author Tim Dyson postulates that the so-called “demographic transition” – a two-step process in which diminishing mortality rates are followed by decreases in total fertility – is an important predictor of a society’s transition from autocracy to democracy. Specifically, Dyson suggests that the population surge resulting from a decline in mortality may tend to destabilize pre-democratic regimes, while a subsequent drop in fertility rates may empower women and raise the median age of a population, thus paving the way for democracy to emerge. Dyson demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between population aging and inclination toward democracy, echoing the work of New Security Beat contributor, Richard Cincotta.

Dialogue at the Wilson Center tackled demography and the environment last week, interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Wilson Center public policy scholar Caryle Murphy about her new book, A Kingdom’s Future: Saudi Arabia Through the Eyes of Its Twentysomethings, followed by John Sullivan, director of the Environment and Health and Safety News Division for Bloomberg BNA, on the most important energy and environmental issues of 2013.