The review, which searched PubMed and Google Scholar for English-language research on children, adolescents, armed conflict, forced displacement, and mental health outcomes, organized its findings along two intersecting axes. The first is temporal, following harm from the acute crisis through protracted displacement into adulthood. The second is mechanistic, specifying five pathways through which war damages developing psyches: direct trauma exposure, including injury, witnessed violence, bereavement, and forced participation in hostilities; disruption of caregiving through separation, caregiver death, and the erosion of parenting capacity under survival conditions; loss of educational and social structure as schools are destroyed and peer networks fragment; chronic deprivation spanning food insecurity, unsafe water, inadequate shelter, and entrenched poverty; and barriers to care arising from health system collapse, workforce scarcity, and stigma. Critically, the authors emphasize that these mechanisms are not phase-specific—each operates across the entire temporal arc, changing in character rather than resolving.

In the immediate phase, children face sudden and chaotic disruption: penetrating injuries, blunt trauma, crush injuries, and burns from shelling and explosions, alongside acute stress reactions marked by fear, hyperarousal, sleep disturbances, and somatic complaints. Armed conflict has been linked to a three-fold increase in infant and child mortality, largely from shortages of food, clean water, and nutrition that worsen malnutrition and weaken immune systems. Young children often regress, become clingy, aggressive, or withdrawn, and the destruction of caregiving structures compounds the damage. Many caregivers are preoccupied with basic survival, leaving children to process distressing experiences without emotional support—a pattern that disrupts attachment and can produce heightened fear, aggression, dependency, and psychosomatic symptoms. Forced displacement also creates unaccompanied minors who must navigate refugee camps, orphanages, or distant relatives alone, conditions that carry significant psychological stress and vulnerability to mental health disorders.

In the months and years that follow, the same mechanisms persist but change form. Displacement becomes protracted rather than sudden, caregiver separation hardens into prolonged absence or permanent loss, and deprivation becomes chronic rather than episodic. What distinguishes this phase is the added burden of adaptation: children must negotiate unfamiliar languages, cultures, legal statuses, and schooling systems at precisely the point when the family and community structures that would ordinarily support that adaptation are themselves degraded. Across studies, exposure to armed conflict and displacement was consistently associated with elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, behavioral disturbances, sleep problems, and impaired social functioning. Displacement interrupts immunization schedules and continuity of primary care, contributing to excess child mortality well after active hostilities subside, while refugee mothers face higher risks of preterm birth and stillbirth—outcomes that degrade the caregiving environment available to surviving children.

The long-term picture is equally sobering. Prolonged exposure to stress during early development can disrupt corticolimbic circuits implicated in threat appraisal, emotion regulation, and executive function, with documented alterations in amygdala–prefrontal connectivity and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis reactivity. Chronic mental health conditions such as PTSD, anxiety, and depression persist into adulthood, alongside impaired cognitive functioning, disrupted learning, memory, and reasoning abilities, and difficulties with relationships and social integration. Disrupted education and weakened economic systems contribute to a cycle of poverty that further compromises health, nutrition, and future opportunities. Post-conflict data reveal disturbing realities among former child soldiers: nearly a quarter report having killed someone, including family members, and a third of girls report having been raped. An audience effect, in which adolescents internalize violence as performance, further fuels ongoing aggression in affected communities, embedding war’s legacy into the next generation.

On the question of intergenerational trauma, the review draws careful distinctions between pathways that differ substantially in evidential support. The best-supported mechanisms are psychological, familial, and sociocultural: parental post-traumatic symptoms, altered parenting behaviors, disrupted family communication, and the transmission of narratives and silences about the traumatic past are consistently associated with offspring adjustment across multiple populations. Danieli’s model describes how initial trauma, post-trauma family adaptational styles, and the surrounding sociocultural environment interact across generations, with reported patterns including emotional numbness and overprotectiveness in the exposed generation and social withdrawal, difficulty trusting others, and heightened anxiety among their children. A meta-analysis of 32 samples of Holocaust survivor offspring found evidence of secondary traumatization in clinical samples but not in adequately designed non-clinical samples, indicating that offspring risk depends on additional stressors rather than following inevitably from parental exposure. Biological mechanisms occupy a different tier: while differences in DNA methylation at glucocorticoid-related loci have been reported in trauma-exposed individuals and, in smaller studies, in their offspring, human studies are small, largely cross-sectional, and unable to separate germline transmission from prenatal exposure, postnatal caregiving, and shared environment. Claims of inherited epigenetic effects in war-exposed families should accordingly be read as hypotheses under investigation rather than established findings.

Protective factors emerge clearly from the synthesized literature: stable caregiving relationships, educational continuity, social support, and access to community-based psychosocial services. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework helps explain how conflict reaches the child through cascading disruptions to family, school, community, and societal systems—caregiver mental health, family cohesion, peer relationships, school climate, and community resources each independently predict child outcomes, and their simultaneous degradation during conflict amplifies risk in non-additive ways. This framework underscores why narrowly clinical interventions, however evidence-based, are insufficient in the absence of broader system-level repair. Schools are increasingly adopting trauma-informed approaches that foster safe, supportive environments and equip educators with tools to recognize and respond to trauma, creating opportunities for healing and academic success even amid ongoing precarity.

On interventions, the review finds a striking paradox: the modalities with the strongest evidence are the least scalable in active conflict. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy and narrative exposure therapy adapted for children, known as KIDNET, have both been tested in randomized trials with conflict-affected and refugee youth and produce moderate to large reductions in PTSD symptoms in meta-analyses spanning diverse settings. But TF-CBT typically requires eight to sixteen sessions, a trained therapist, ongoing supervision, and structured caregiver involvement, whereas KIDNET can be delivered in roughly four to ten sessions and does not depend on an available caregiver—an advantage where family structures have been destroyed or separated. An intermediate tier of school-based and group-delivered programs such as Teaching Recovery Techniques and Writing for Recovery shows more variable results: an individual participant data meta-analysis of focused psychosocial interventions in low-resource humanitarian settings found overall benefit for PTSD symptoms, functional impairment, hope, coping, and social support, but the improvement in PTSD symptoms was concentrated among adolescents aged 15 to 18, non-displaced children, and children in smaller households—subgroups showing least benefit are frequently the ones humanitarian programs are designed to reach. A third tier of creative arts modalities, caregiver-focused parenting interventions, and community-level activities such as child-friendly spaces rests on a thinner evidence base but is widely implemented for acceptability, reach, and low delivery cost.

The authors argue that these considerations favor stepped and layered delivery, in which non-specialist and group-based approaches provide broad coverage while scarce specialist capacity is reserved for children with severe or persistent impairment—an approach consistent with the WHO–UNHCR mhGAP Humanitarian Intervention Guide but not yet adequately tested at scale. Cultural adaptation introduces further tension: surface adaptations such as translation and locally contextualized examples are routinely undertaken and do not appear to compromise effects, whereas deeper adaptations to explanatory models of distress, help-seeking norms, and the acceptability of narrating traumatic experience aloud are less often documented and almost never evaluated as adaptations in their own right. Implementation constraints in active conflict compound both problems: attrition from renewed displacement, insecurity for participants and providers alike, absent referral pathways for children who deteriorate during treatment, and humanitarian funding cycles that end programs before gains consolidate. Even where effective interventions exist, the treatment gap remains profound—in many low- and middle-income countries hosting most displaced children, child and adolescent mental health specialists number in the single digits per million population, and dedicated child-focused services within humanitarian responses are routinely under-prioritized and under-funded relative to physical health and shelter.

The review’s conclusion is a call for a fundamental shift away from narrow, deficit-focused, single-modality approaches toward a sustained, interdisciplinary, and rights-based response embedded within schools, families, healthcare systems, and child protection frameworks. Mental health and psychosocial support must be treated as a core component of humanitarian response rather than an optional add-on, with dedicated funding lines, indicators, and accountability mechanisms aligned with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee guidelines and Sphere standards. Durable solutions for displaced children—safe family reunification, regularized legal status, school enrollment, and economic inclusion of caregivers—are themselves mental health interventions, and policies that prolong precarity should be recognized as health-harming. Closing the evidence gaps will require prospective longitudinal cohorts tracking developmental trajectories from acute exposure through adulthood and across generations, culturally validated assessment tools, pragmatic trials of stepped-care and task-shifted interventions at scale, and participatory research that meaningfully involves children, adolescents, caregivers, and affected communities in defining priorities. The authors stress that resilience is supported through sustained investment, allowing war-affected children not only to survive, but to heal and thrive.

Subject of Research: Psychological impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on children and adolescents

Article Title: Psychological impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on children and adolescents

Article References: Masoomi, M., Saeidi, M., Salehi, M., Prasad, S., Alzein, O., Roy, D., Joshi, M., & Gunturu, S. (2026). Psychological impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on children and adolescents. Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 5, Article 1912159. https://doi.org/10.3389/frcha.2026.1912159

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frcha.2026.1912159

Keywords: Psychological, impact, armed, conflict, forced, displacement, children, adolescents, scientific research

The three-factor structure that emerged from the psychometric analysis offers a useful conceptual map for thinking about adaptation after displacement. The first factor, individual adaptive capacity, resembles conventional resilience constructs and captures personal coping resources. The second factor, support seeking and relational resource use, reflects the ability to identify, reach, and draw upon social networks, whether family, friends, or community ties. The third factor, service and rights navigation, is the most novel contribution: it measures the practical competence of engaging with institutions, understanding entitlements, and completing the procedural tasks that displacement imposes. That this dimension emerged independently through both exploratory and confirmatory approaches suggests it is not merely an artifact of item wording but a distinguishable domain of functioning that general resilience measures simply do not touch.

The statistical evidence supporting the scale is strongest in some areas and more cautious in others. Internal consistency estimates for the three factors, expressed as ordinal alpha values between 0.816 and 0.859, fall comfortably within acceptable ranges for research instruments. The correlated three-factor model achieved a comparative fit index of 0.952 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.064 in the internal holdout subsample, figures that meet conventional thresholds for acceptable fit. Equally important is what the bifactor analysis revealed: with explained common variance of 0.496 and hierarchical omega of 0.694, the data did not support collapsing the sixteen items into a single total score. This is a meaningful finding for future users of the scale, because it indicates that the three dimensions carry sufficiently distinct information that averaging across them would obscure more than it reveals. Researchers adopting the instrument should therefore analyze and report the subscales separately rather than relying on an overall summary.

The two-week test-retest stability estimates, ranging from 0.578 to 0.647, fall below the conventional benchmark of 0.70 and warrant careful interpretation. Several considerations are relevant here. Short retest intervals with modest subsample sizes can produce attenuated stability coefficients, and factor scores derived from ordinal models are subject to estimation variability that raw scores are not. Nevertheless, the authors are transparent that this figure does not meet the standard threshold, and they position the scale accordingly: as a research instrument suited primarily to group-level description rather than individual-level assessment or outcome tracking. This honesty about limitations is consistent with contemporary measurement standards, which emphasize that preliminary validation is a stage in an ongoing process rather than a terminal verdict on an instrument’s worth.

Measurement invariance testing adds another layer of confidence to the findings. The absence of scalar invariance violations across the five grouping variables that could be examined suggests that the scale functions comparably across the subgroups tested, meaning that observed group differences in scores are more likely to reflect genuine differences in resource mobilization rather than artifacts of differential item functioning. For a population as heterogeneous as Turkish-literate Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi adults in Istanbul and Ankara, this comparability is not trivial. Displaced communities differ in legal status, length of residence, language proficiency, and access to formal support systems, and an instrument that behaves differently across these groups would produce misleading comparisons.

The cross-sectional associations reported in the study are consistent with theoretical expectations. All three factors correlated positively with dispositional resilience and general self-efficacy, with the strongest association observed for adaptive capacity, the factor conceptually closest to traditional resilience constructs. The weaker but still positive correlations for support seeking and navigation suggest that these dimensions tap something related to but distinct from personal coping disposition. Longer residence in Türkiye and better Turkish comprehension were both associated with higher navigation scores, a pattern that makes intuitive sense: navigating services and claiming rights requires linguistic access and accumulated familiarity with institutional procedures. This finding also hints at the scale’s potential sensitivity to change over time, since language acquisition and institutional familiarity are precisely the kinds of variables that intervention programs and integration policies aim to influence.

The descriptive treatment of perceived stress and depressive symptoms deserves note. The authors report these correlations descriptively because the two comparison measures were almost uncorrelated with each other in the sample, an unexpected pattern that complicates straightforward interpretation of convergent validity. Rather than forcing a narrative onto unstable data, the study presents these results as preliminary observations to be clarified in future research with larger and more representative samples. This restraint reflects a broader principle in scale development: validity evidence accumulates gradually across studies, populations, and time points, and early claims of criterion validity built on anomalous comparison data would be premature.

The methodological architecture of the study merits attention for researchers planning similar work. Splitting the sample into calibration and internal holdout subsamples allowed the factor structure identified in one half of the data to be verified in the other, a form of internal cross-validation that guards against overfitting and capitalizing on chance. The combination of ordinal exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory graph analysis, invariance testing, item response theory, and network psychometrics represents a comprehensive contemporary toolkit, one that goes well beyond the classical approaches that dominated earlier scale development. The use of face-to-face administration with snowball sampling, while pragmatic for reaching a population that is difficult to enumerate, also constrains generalizability, and the authors acknowledge that the sample is non-representative of Turkish-literate displaced adults more broadly.

The development process itself illustrates the value of mixed qualitative and quantitative groundwork. The reduction of an initial theory-derived pool of thirty-six items through a three-round modified Delphi review with eight experts, followed by cognitive interviews with twelve displaced adults, embeds the perspectives of both professional judges and the target population into the instrument’s design. Cognitive interviewing in particular serves a function that statistical item reduction cannot: it reveals whether respondents understand items as intended, whether culturally specific phrasing creates confusion, and whether the lived experience of displacement is faithfully represented in the item content. For instruments intended for vulnerable populations, this step is not optional refinement but essential safeguarding.

Looking forward, the authors identify several priorities that will determine whether the DRMS-16 matures into a widely usable instrument. Item revision may sharpen ambiguous content and improve stability estimates. External replication in independent samples, ideally with probability or quota sampling designs, would test whether the three-factor structure generalizes beyond Istanbul and Ankara. Cross-language validation would extend the scale beyond Turkish-literate respondents, a critical step given that language proficiency itself was associated with navigation scores and may therefore have shaped the sample in substantive ways. Evidence on responsiveness, meaning the scale’s sensitivity to change following interventions or policy shifts, would establish its utility for evaluating programs aimed at improving service access and rights awareness among displaced communities.

The broader significance of this work lies in its reframing of what mental health measurement should capture in displacement contexts. If post-migration difficulties rival trauma exposure as predictors of distress, then instruments that measure only internal coping capacity leave half the picture unmeasured. A scale that treats service navigation and rights claiming as measurable competencies opens the possibility of evaluating integration policies, humanitarian programs, and legal aid services with tools designed for exactly those outcomes. It also provides researchers with a way to test theoretical models in which institutional access functions as a pathway linking policy environments to individual wellbeing. As validation work continues, the DRMS-16 may prove valuable not only as a descriptive instrument but as a bridge between psychometric research and the practical machinery of migration support systems.

Subject of Research: Resource mobilization under forced migration: development and preliminary internal validation of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale (DRMS-16)

Article Title: Resource mobilization under forced migration: development and preliminary internal validation of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale (DRMS-16)

Article References: Çınar, Ö., Cengiz, E., Yıldız, E., Yıldız, S., & Tosunoğlu Kusan, B. (2026). Resource mobilization under forced migration: development and preliminary internal validation of the Displacement Resource Mobilization Scale (DRMS-16). BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05807-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05807-5

Keywords: forced migration, refugee mental health, psychometrics, scale development, resource mobilization, resilience, measurement invariance, item response theory, network psychometrics, Turkish refugees, displacement, Resource

The architectural logic of the framework deserves attention because it reflects a broader trend in applied machine learning toward separating representation learning from task-specific heads. The point-forecast backbone, FA-VAG, was previously reported by Gan and colleagues and is explicitly reused here rather than rebranded as a novelty. That backbone combines several established components: correlation-based screening of neighboring radar monitoring points, variational mode decomposition of the displacement series into narrow-band components, a target-conditioned attention mechanism that weights the contribution of each neighboring point, and gated recurrent units that encode temporal dynamics. What the present study adds is an interface at the point where the network’s internal representation is richest. Instead of discarding the hidden states after they have served the point-forecast head, the authors export the final hidden state of each decomposed mode, concatenate them, and compress the resulting vector with principal component analysis. This reduced representation is then fused with the multi-step point forecasts themselves and fed into a random vector functional link network, a lightweight regressor whose input-to-hidden weights are randomly assigned and frozen while only the output weights are learned. The regressor emits nonnegative offsets that form the lower and upper interval bounds, and a constraint ensures the bounds never cross, which would otherwise produce physically meaningless intervals.

The choice of a random vector functional link network rather than a deeper trainable network for the interval head is worth contextualizing. Randomized-weight networks train quickly because only a linear readout layer is optimized, which makes them attractive when the head must be retrained repeatedly inside an optimization loop, as happens here. The optimization itself is carried out by an improved sparrow search algorithm, a swarm-based metaheuristic inspired by the foraging and anti-predation behavior of sparrows. The improvement described in the paper is prior-informed: rather than initializing the candidate population randomly, it seeds part of the population using a residual-based pseudo-inverse solution, which gives the optimizer a head start near a analytically reasonable region of the search space. Levy-flight exploration, which generates occasional long jumps in parameter space, helps the swarm escape local optima, and dimension-wise perturbation refines individual coordinates. The objective being optimized is magnitude-aware, meaning that the penalty on interval width scales with the deformation amplitude, so the model is not rewarded for producing uniformly wide envelopes that would trivially achieve high coverage during quiet periods and fail during rapid deformation.

This magnitude-awareness connects to one of the most important failure modes in landslide forecasting: regime change. Slope deformation is rarely stationary. A hillside may creep at a few millimeters per day for months and then accelerate abruptly under sustained rainfall, snowmelt, or a change in groundwater conditions. An interval model calibrated on the stable regime tends to wrap its predictions in envelopes sized for that regime, and when the slope transitions into a faster state the envelopes under-cover the observations exactly when warnings matter most. The motivation for transferring the hidden states of the point-forecast model is that those states encode, implicitly, information about the current deformation regime, because the recurrent encoder has seen the recent history of the decomposed modes. If the interval head can read regime-sensitive features out of that representation, interval width can become conditional on the observed state rather than a nearly constant residual envelope. The authors are careful to frame this as a heteroscedastic motivation rather than a claim of guaranteed change-point detection, which is an appropriate level of caution given that no explicit change-point model is fitted.

The reported results illustrate both the promise and the practical difficulty of this approach. For the prespecified target point 7, the framework achieved a prediction interval coverage probability of 0.90 with a mean prediction interval width of 5.97 and a coverage-width-based criterion of 5.97 for five-step-ahead prediction, and coverage of 1.00 with width 8.74 for seven-step prediction. Coverage of 1.00 means every held-out observation fell inside the predicted bounds, which is reassuring but also hints that the seven-step intervals may be conservative, since a perfectly calibrated interval at a nominal confidence level would typically show coverage close to, but not exactly at, the nominal value. The external validation result is the more sobering figure: on an independent dataset, coverage remained at 0.90 but the mean interval width ballooned to 58.82. This pattern, in which coverage is preserved while sharpness degrades dramatically, is a common signature of distribution shift between training and deployment conditions. The model, in effect, responded to unfamiliar conditions by widening its envelopes, which is the safe behavior but not the informative one. It suggests that the transferred representation generalizes in the sense of maintaining coverage, but that the width calibration does not transfer as cleanly across sites or periods.

Several contextual points help place these numbers in perspective. First, the two evaluated datasets differ in deformation amplitude and dynamics, and interval widths scale with the magnitude of the deformation being bounded, so a width of 58.82 on a rapidly deforming slope may be proportionally no worse than 5.97 on a slowly creeping one. Reporting widths in absolute units without normalizing by the local displacement scale is a known limitation of the coverage-width criterion family, and readers comparing across studies should keep this in mind. Second, the field of uncertainty quantification for time-series forecasting offers several alternative frameworks against which this method should eventually be benchmarked. Conformal prediction, for example, provides distribution-free coverage guarantees under exchangeability assumptions and has been increasingly applied to environmental forecasting; quantile regression and its gradient-boosted variants directly estimate conditional quantiles; Bayesian neural networks and deep ensembles propagate parameter uncertainty into predictive distributions. Each has strengths and weaknesses regarding computational cost, adaptivity to regime change, and theoretical guarantees, and the authors themselves acknowledge that additional probabilistic baselines are needed before the framework’s relative merits can be judged definitively.

The ablation study reported in the paper, which disentangles the contributions of the transferred hidden states, the PCA reduction, the non-crossing constraint, and the prior-informed optimizer, is another element that would benefit from harmonized reruns under standardized protocols. Ablation results are notoriously sensitive to random seeds, data splits, and hyperparameter search budgets, and meta-analyses across machine-learning subfields have repeatedly shown that apparently large component-wise gains can shrink or vanish when baselines are tuned with equal care. The authors’ explicit call for harmonized reruns is therefore a welcome instance of methodological candor, and it aligns with broader community efforts to make geohazard forecasting benchmarks more reproducible.

From an operational standpoint, the distinction between five-step and seven-step prediction horizons matters for early-warning practice. Shorter horizons give decision-makers less lead time but are easier to predict accurately, so their intervals can be narrow; longer horizons provide more preparation time but accumulate forecast uncertainty, which the widening of the intervals from 5.97 to 8.74 reflects. A monitoring system built on this framework would presumably issue warnings based on whether the upper interval bound crosses an engineering threshold, since the upper bound represents a pessimistic but probabilistically qualified scenario. The non-crossing constraint on the bounds ensures that such threshold logic remains coherent across all forecast steps.

It is also worth noting what GB-SAR brings to this pipeline relative to sparse point sensors such as extensometers, total stations, or Global Navigation Satellite System receivers. Because the radar measures line-of-sight displacement over an entire scene at high temporal frequency, it supplies the dense multi-point inputs that the correlation-screening and attention stages exploit. The screening step, which retains only neighboring points whose Pearson correlation with the target exceeds a threshold computed on training data, acts as a form of spatial feature selection that reduces noise and dimensionality before decomposition. This design implicitly assumes that spatially correlated neighbors carry predictive information about the target, an assumption supported by the physics of slope deformation, where adjacent surface elements tend to respond coherently to shared driving forces such as rainfall infiltration and groundwater fluctuation.

The preprocessing choices embedded in the pipeline also carry scientific weight. Differentiating the displacement series before variational mode decomposition converts cumulative displacement into velocity-like signals, which are typically more stationary and easier for recurrent models to learn, while reconstruction of the forecast modes back into displacement happens downstream. Variational mode decomposition itself, introduced as an alternative to empirical mode decomposition, decomposes a signal into a prescribed number of band-limited modes by solving a constrained variational problem, and the number of modes controls the decomposition resolution. Each mode is processed by its own branch of the network, and the concatenation of the final hidden states across modes is what gives the transferred representation its multiscale character, capturing both slow creep and rapid episodic acceleration in separate channels.

Finally, the study’s positioning within the literature on landslide displacement forecasting is instructive. Earlier interval methods based on bootstrap resampling quantify uncertainty by repeatedly refitting models to resampled residuals, which is robust but computationally heavy and can produce overly conservative intervals when residual variability is large. Direct lower-upper-bound network approaches avoid distributional assumptions but depend heavily on architecture and optimization. The present framework can be read as a middle path: it inherits the representational strength of a pretrained deep model while keeping the interval head lightweight and explicitly optimized for the coverage-width trade-off. Whether that middle path proves superior in practice will depend on the broader comparative evaluations the authors themselves call for, and on whether the external-validation width inflation can be tamed through site-adaptive calibration, transfer learning of the width head, or online recalibration as new radar observations arrive. For now, the work offers a concrete, honestly evaluated template for turning point-forecast machinery into uncertainty-aware early-warning tools, and its transparent separation of what is reused from what is new sets a good example for the field.

Subject of Research: A GB-SAR slope displacement interval prediction method based on FA-VAG feature transfer and an improved sparrow search algorithm

Article Title: A GB-SAR slope displacement interval prediction method based on FA-VAG feature transfer and an improved sparrow search algorithm

Article References: Dai, Y., Zhao, Z., Gan, X., & Liao, S. (2026). A GB-SAR slope displacement interval prediction method based on FA-VAG feature transfer and an improved sparrow search algorithm. Frontiers in Earth Science, 14, Article 1946406. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2026.1946406

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feart.2026.1946406

Keywords: GB-SAR, slope, displacement, interval, prediction, method, based, FA-VAG, feature, transfer, improved, sparrow

Toprak is primarily known for her short stories. Her first collection, Letter in the Suitcase (Valizdeki Mektup), appeared in 2007, followed by a second collection, Which Language is Love (Hangi Dildedir Aşk). She then shifted to novel writing with The Children of July (Temmuz Çocukları) in 2011, and went on to publish The End of Lament (Ağıtın Sonu), The Whisper of Bees (Arı Fısıltıları), and Déjàvu. From her earliest stories onward, the study notes, Toprak has created introspective characters and returned persistently to themes of gender, identity, and the experiences of migrant women. That consistency across nearly two decades of publication is precisely what makes her body of work suitable for a sustained analytical treatment rather than isolated readings of individual books.

The theoretical core of the study is intersectionality, a framework that originated in legal and feminist scholarship and has since spread across the social sciences and humanities. Its central methodological claim is that categories of identity and disadvantage do not operate in isolation. A person’s experience of, for example, gender discrimination cannot be fully understood without also considering how migration status, class, language, and cultural background interact with it. In the context of literary analysis, this means that a character who is both a woman and a migrant is not simply subject to two separate pressures added together; she inhabits a distinct social position created by the intersection of those structures, with its own emotional and political texture.

Applied to Toprak’s fiction, the framework allows the researchers to ask a precise question: how are these overlapping axes of identity narratively constructed, emotionally expressed, and structurally encoded in her texts? The distinction among those three modes is one of the study’s technical contributions. Narrative construction refers to how characters’ intersecting identities are built into the plot, setting, and point of view. Emotional expression concerns how the psychological consequences of intersecting power structures are rendered in the characters’ inner lives. Structural encoding, in turn, refers to the way the architecture of the fiction itself—its organization, recurring motifs, and patterns of characterization—carries the imprint of those same structures.

The researchers employed thematic close reading as their primary method. Close reading is the traditional instrument of literary scholarship: the sustained, line-by-line attention to how a text makes meaning through word choice, imagery, narrative sequence, and silence. By making it thematic, the analysis directs that attention specifically toward recurring clusters of meaning connected to gender, displacement, and belonging. This method is well suited to a corpus like Toprak’s, in which the same preoccupations surface across short stories and novels written over many years, because it allows patterns to be traced across the whole body of work rather than within a single text.

What emerges from this approach, according to the study, is a picture of fiction in which the personal and the collective are continuously intertwined. Toprak’s protagonists do not experience migration merely as a change of location. The analysis suggests that her work offers nuanced literary insight into the interplay between personal and collective forms of displacement, belonging, and agency. In other words, the individual character’s sense of who she is—her language, her memory, her relationships—is depicted as inseparable from the larger histories of movement, settlement, and cultural negotiation that surround her. This is a hallmark of what scholars of migration literature look for: writing in which the private interior life becomes a lens on transnational experience.

The authors’ own biography is relevant to this reading, and the study treats it as such. As a migrant woman writer, Toprak does not simply observe transnational experiences from the outside; the researchers argue that she reflects them in her protagonists from a position of lived knowledge. This does not mean the fiction is autobiographical in a simple sense, but it does mean that the emotional register of the work—the texture of displacement, the negotiation between languages and cultural affiliations—carries an authenticity that the study identifies as central to its literary significance. The double position of author and characters, both navigating gendered expectations and cultural displacement, creates what the researchers describe as a mutually illuminating relationship between the writer’s perspective and her fictional worlds.

The study also situates its contribution within a broader scholarly landscape. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the journal that published the work, has in recent years featured a cluster of interdisciplinary research on migration, including ethnocultural and sociological analyses of historical migration documents and artificial-intelligence-based studies of how migrants are visually portrayed across different countries. Against that backdrop, the new analysis adds a literary dimension: where sociological and computational approaches measure migration’s external patterns, Toprak’s fiction—and the intersectional reading of it—documents its internal, psychological, and emotional dimensions. The researchers explicitly state that their interdisciplinary approach illuminates the emotional, political, and psychological dimensions of migration in her work.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates how a social-science framework can be imported into literary criticism without losing the specificity of the literary object. Intersectionality supplies the analytical categories—gender, migration status, cultural affiliation—but close reading supplies the evidence, drawn from the texts themselves. The researchers report no competing interests and note that the article involved no studies with human participants, which is typical for textual analysis. The work was received in late 2024, accepted in September 2026, and published as an open-access article, making the full analysis freely available to other researchers working on Turkish literature, migration studies, or feminist literary theory.

The significance of the study extends beyond a single author. Contemporary migration literature is one of the fastest-growing fields in the comparative study of world literature, and scholars have increasingly sought rigorous frameworks for reading fiction written from within the migrant experience rather than about it from a distance. By demonstrating that intersectionality can be operationalized through thematic close reading—tracking how intersecting identities are constructed, expressed, and encoded across a coherent body of work—Dervişoğlu and Bilecen provide a transferable model for analyzing other authors who write at the intersection of gender and transnational displacement. Their conclusion that Toprak deserves recognition as a significant voice in contemporary migration literature is thus both a claim about one writer’s achievement and an argument about where the most illuminating questions in migration literary studies are now being asked.

Subject of Research: An intersectional literary analysis of gender, migration, and identity in the fiction of Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article Title: An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article References: Dervişoğlu, E., & Bilecen, T. (2026). An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09071-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09071-1

Keywords: Menekşe Toprak, intersectionality, Turkish literature, migration literature, gender studies, female protagonists, thematic close reading, displacement, belonging, contemporary fiction, literary analysis, transnational identity

The research, led by John Paul Tugume together with Bernard Bashaasha and Elizabeth Ahikiriza, draws on secondary data from the Resilience Index and Measurement Analysis household survey, a joint effort of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics conducted under the RIMA-II framework. Households were selected using a two-stage stratified random sampling design based on United Nations refugee agency registration lists, giving the sample a statistically grounded claim to represent the wider refugee population living in Uganda’s settlements. The authors constructed a Livelihood Resilience Index using Principal Component Analysis, a statistical technique that condenses many correlated indicators into a smaller set of underlying dimensions, and then validated the index through bootstrap resampling of one thousand replicates and external checks against independent measures.

Human capital, in the framing of the study, is not a single quantity but a bundle of endowments: education, health, and vocational skills. Each component, the researchers argue, contributes differently to a household’s capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and recover its income and consumption levels after disruption. To capture these differences, the team estimated associations using both Ordinary Least Squares regression and quantile regression at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of the resilience distribution. This dual approach matters because average effects can hide as much as they reveal. A program or endowment that helps households already doing reasonably well may do nothing for those at the bottom, and only by tracing coefficients across the distribution can analysts see where an intervention actually bites.

The quantile results are the technical heart of the paper, and they tell three distinct stories. Health, measured as an indicator of the household head’s physical condition, shows a universal effect: its coefficient of roughly 0.016 is statistically significant across every quantile examined, from the most vulnerable tenth of households to the most resilient. In practical terms, better health among household heads is associated with higher livelihood resilience everywhere along the distribution, making it the one human capital component whose benefits are not rationed by circumstance. For the poorest and most exposed households, this finding suggests that health protection is not merely a welfare concern but a direct investment in economic resilience.

Vocational training tells a very different story. Its effects are concentrated at the upper quantiles of the resilience distribution, the 75th and 90th percentiles, with no detectable effect for households in the lower half. Skills training, in other words, appears to pay off mainly for households that already possess other advantages, such as assets, social networks, or market access, that allow them to convert training into income. For the most vulnerable households, the same training produces no measurable resilience gain. This pattern echoes a long-standing concern in development economics: interventions that require complementary endowments to work tend to bypass the people they are most intended to help, and the study’s quantile evidence gives that concern concrete statistical form in a refugee setting.

Education, the component most often treated as the foundation of human capital, could not be reliably estimated at all. With only 0.5 percent of household heads holding secondary qualifications or above, there is simply too little variation in the data for the regression models to identify an effect. The authors are careful about this limitation, but they also insist on its significance. The near-total absence of post-primary education among refugee household heads is not a statistical nuisance; it is itself the central finding, a fundamental human capital deficit that constrains what any other intervention can achieve and threatens intergenerational mobility, since children raised by parents with no schooling face compounded barriers to educational attainment of their own.

The implications of this distributional picture are considerable for humanitarian policy. Uganda’s refugee response has increasingly emphasized self-reliance, shifting from open-ended aid toward livelihoods programming that expects households to farm, trade, and earn their way to stability. But the study suggests that such programming is being asked to operate on a population whose human capital base has been almost entirely eroded. If vocational training only helps the upper quantiles, and if education is effectively absent, then the resilience of the majority of refugee households rests heavily on a single pillar: the health of the household head. That concentration of dependence is fragile, because a health shock to one adult can cascade directly into a livelihood collapse with no educational or skills buffer to soften the fall.

The methodological choices of the paper deserve attention in their own right. By constructing the Livelihood Resilience Index through Principal Component Analysis rather than ad hoc weighting, the authors let the data determine how indicators combine, and by comparing results across alternative index versions, including variants built from different indicator sets, they show that the health effect is robust to reasonable modeling decisions. The comparison of a small subsample against the full sample of 1,868 households, along with quantile regressions run on a slightly reduced estimation sample of 1,738, reflects an effort to be transparent about how sample composition shapes conclusions. For a field often criticized for averaging away the experiences of the worst-off, the explicit use of quantile regression at five points across the distribution is a model of what careful measurement can look like.

What the study cannot say is as important as what it can. Because the design is cross-sectional and relies on secondary data, the estimated associations do not establish causation; healthier household heads may be more resilient, or more resilient households may be able to protect their health, or both. The education coefficient is unidentified by construction, so no claim can be made about how schooling would translate into resilience among this population. And the data capture household heads only, leaving open questions about the education and skills of other adults in the household and about how intra-household dynamics shape resilience. These are the standard boundaries of observational survey research, and the authors acknowledge them rather than overreaching.

Even within those boundaries, the message is hard to escape. A refugee population in which fewer than one in two hundred household heads has secondary education is a population whose economic future cannot be secured by skills workshops and microenterprise schemes alone. The findings argue for rebuilding the educational base itself, both for current adults whose schooling was interrupted by displacement and for children whose prospects will determine the next generation’s resilience, while simultaneously protecting the health endowment that currently does the heavy lifting for the most vulnerable. As displacement crises multiply worldwide and protracted refugee situations become the norm rather than the exception, this Ugandan evidence offers a sobering quantitative reminder: resilience is built over decades of human capital accumulation, and no short-term program can fully substitute for the schooling that was lost along the way.

Subject of Research: Human capital and livelihood resilience among refugee households in Uganda

Article Title: Educational exclusion and livelihood resilience among refugee households in Uganda

Article References: Tugume, J. P., Bashaasha, B., & Ahikiriza, E. (2026). Educational exclusion and livelihood resilience among refugee households in Uganda. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04961-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04961-5

Keywords: refugee livelihoods, human capital, education, health, vocational training, resilience, Uganda, quantile regression, RIMA-II, livelihood resilience index, displacement, development economics

The historical backdrop is essential to understanding why such institutions emerged at all. Colombia’s internal armed conflict has raged since the 1960s, pitting the national army against guerrilla groups, paramilitary forces, and a shifting cast of other combatants. According to the National Centre for Historical Memory, more than six million people were forcibly displaced from central regions by 2015, many of them resettling precariously along the ‘agricultural frontier’ – the advancing edge of colonization where forest is cleared and new land incorporated into production. These displaced settlers, or colonos, often occupied land without formal titles, sometimes on parcels granted by the state, sometimes simply on territory considered unoccupied. From the 1980s and 1990s onward, the state offered specific perimeters for settlement: resguardos for indigenous populations, collective councils for Afro-descendant communities, and Peasant Reserve Zones for farming families. Yet the application of Plan Colombia, the US-backed counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency program, and the expansion of paramilitary groups controlling commodity and illicit-crop trade pushed the mobile guerrillas back into their historical strongholds, intensifying pressure on the very communities trying to put down roots.

The study traces the genealogy of peasant mobilization to the mid-1980s, during a truce between the FARC and the government. An inquiry led by sociologists including the celebrated chronicler Alfredo Molano among colonos in the Macarena mountains and the Caguán region produced a proposal addressed to the government: grant settlers property rights on land within what would later become a national natural park, provide technical assistance, and in exchange the producers would commit to managing the forest, wildlife, and soils. This proposal prefigured the ZRC model, formally recognized by Law 160 of 1994. Protest marches in 1985 and 1987 toward departmental capitals such as San José del Guaviare, led by peasant families, coca-leaf pickers, and traders, demanded recognition of populations who had occupied their lands for some thirty years since the period of La Violencia. When structural adjustment policies swept through Latin America in the mid-1990s, liberalizing markets and withdrawing the state, the Ministry of Agriculture estimated that at least one million peasants suffered income losses by 1994 – a grievance that fueled renewed mobilization and the demand for reserve zones where families could cultivate land.

The trajectory was brutally interrupted. The Patriotic Union political party, created after the 1984 accord between the FARC, the colonos, and the government in the department of Meta, saw thousands of its members – elected officials, mayors, and two presidential candidates in 1989 – assassinated by paramilitary groups between 1985 and 1990. The collapse of the El Caguán peace process in 2002 and the post-September 11 international context produced Plan Colombia, which strengthened paramilitaries defending large landholdings. Their scorched-earth policy included massacres such as Mapiripán in the department of Meta in 1997, a municipality that had hosted meetings about a pilot Peasant Reserve Zone project and had drawn virulent opposition from large landowners practicing extensive cattle ranching. In this crucible of violence, the researchers show, armed actors themselves became governance providers: guerrillas with deep local roots, particularly the FARC, played mediation roles and could constitute what geographer Robert McColl termed an ‘insurgent state,’ establishing territorial control through refuge spaces and population protection while simultaneously demonstrating the government’s inefficacy.

Against this turbulent canvas, the JAC represent the oldest thread of local self-organization. Created by Law 19 of 1958 as part of a public administration reorganization, they began as urban neighborhood associations and were adapted in rural areas by displaced colonos as forms of intermediation with the state. The first JAC along the Caguán River in Caquetá date to 1972, before the FARC even established themselves there; by 1975, two already held legal personhood and functioned regularly. Theoretically apolitical, these committees of neighbors can receive delegated functions of control, oversight, and management of public services from municipal councils, departmental assemblies, or the national government. In rural areas they rest on the veredas – subdivisions of rural municipalities – and on shared identity and belonging. A former national director of the JAC system claimed the committees contributed to building 30 percent of the nation’s infrastructure: rural roads, community halls, chapels, schools, and markets. During the Caguán negotiations, the JAC even served as mediation spaces between guerrillas and government delegates, and in zones of guerrilla or even paramilitary influence they often became the sole representation of civilian power.

The ZRC, by contrast, are a land-access instrument born of agrarian struggle. Defined by Law 160 of 1994 as geographic zones selected by the general council of the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform according to agro-ecological and socioeconomic characteristics, they were regulated nationally by Decree 1777 of 1996, which allowed their creation in all regions rather than only in colonization zones. The first six ZRC emerged from a pilot plan co-financed by the World Bank from 1997. The study focuses on two contrasting cases in the Andean axis: the Pato-Balsillas ZRC in Caquetá, officially recognized in 1997, and the North Cauca ZRC, whose recognition by the National Land Agency remained pending as of 2024 despite years of requests. Pato-Balsillas, a transition zone between Andean and Amazonian systems on the eastern flank of the Eastern Cordillera, experienced four waves of colonization identified by researcher J. González – from quinine and rubber extraction through 1920, early colonization to 1950, ‘colonization by violence’ between 1950 and 1965, and finally flight following army bombardments, after which families returned in a homecoming commemorated annually since 1984 with a festival of ‘the return.’

Today the Pato-Balsillas ZRC spans roughly 74,000 hectares with about 6,250 inhabitants, organized into three towns and 26 vereda committees. It is managed by the Municipal Association of Colonos of the Pato River, AMCOP, whose board includes representatives of every vereda junta and of colonos’ cooperatives producing bananas, milk, and coffee. A social fund, fed by one percent of each agricultural sale by member producers, reallocates resources to members in need. Specialized committees handle conflict resolution, women’s affairs, and youth. The association’s regulatory reach is tangible: residents described to interviewers how suspected thieves are detained, the police called, and outsiders who commit serious offenses collectively expelled after news is spread across every vereda so that no one gives them work. AMCOP also links the community into wider networks – the UNIOS union of social, agrarian, environmental, human rights, peasant, and indigenous organizations, and the departmental coordination COORDOSAC in Caquetá. Crucially, AMCOP protects a buffer zone between the ZRC perimeter and Los Picachos National Natural Park, an arrangement the regional environmental authority CORPOAMAZONIA formally recognizes, following a 1997 agreement that redefined park boundaries and relocated some of the roughly 200 colonist families living inside the park through a mini land-reform program distributing parcels from a large estate.

The North Cauca case shows a different pathway: governance functioning without official recognition. In the fertile Cauca River valley, where sugar-cane expansion from the 1940s concentrated land in large estates and indigenous movements led by Manuel Quintín Lame had long reclaimed ancestral territories, three associations – ASTRACAL, ASTRAZONAC, and ASPROZONAC – carry the ZRC project forward with elected boards registered at the chamber of commerce. Connected to the national agricultural federation FENSUAGRO through the PUPSOC popular unity process, they coordinate recognition of long-established settlers, form ‘peasant territories’ even where families lack titles, and negotiate land acquisition for new arrivals. After the 2013 national agrarian strike, which blocked the Pan-American Highway in Cauca for three months, PUPSOC and the CIMA organization established a permanent dialogue roundtable with the government, strengthening their recognition and securing progress in parcel allocation. Land occupation itself, shared as a strategy by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant organizations alike, remains a lever of spatial appropriation confined largely to the cordillera slopes, with almost no access to valley floor land.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns environmental governance. The Pato-Balsillas communities maintain a manual of coexistence whose ecological rules are explicit: each junta names an ecological committee to safeguard forest, streams, fauna, and flora; commercial hunting is absolutely prohibited; felling trees or primary and secondary forest older than eight years is banned; violations incur up to fifty days of communal labor or reforestation of the affected zone. The result, documented with reference to FAO and National Land Agency data, is a deforestation rate below one percent within and around the ZRC – a remarkable figure given that its jurisdiction, San Vicente del Caguán, ranked for years among the country’s deforestation hotspots. A parallel experiment in the Cimitarra River valley, the ‘yellow line,’ has marked trees since 1983 to delimit some 70,000 hectares of biodiverse, water-rich territory, later ratified by the peasant association, backed by technical soil studies, and ultimately rewarded with a forest reserve designation and a mining moratorium. The authors conclude that these deep spatial knowledges – of paths, rain cycles, flora, and fauna – combined with learned appropriation of state instruments, give rural organizations local legitimacy and real intermediation power. In a country where the 2016 peace agreement has not ended confrontation with holdout armed groups, they argue, the future of rural territories depends on better interaction between these bottom-up practices and national decision-making – a reconfiguration of the state that, remarkably, is being built from below.

Subject of Research: Bottom-up local governance and collective action by peasant communities in Colombia's armed conflict

Article Title: Action collective et formes locales de gouvernance en contexte de conflit armé en Colombie

Article References: Lopez Galvis, A. F., & Guibert, M. (2026). Action collective et formes locales de gouvernance en contexte de conflit armé en Colombie. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 589-601. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-589-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-589-2026

Keywords: Colombia, armed conflict, peasant governance, Community Action Committees, Peasant Reserve Zones, land reform, FARC, collective action, rural development, deforestation, bottom-up governance, displacement

The study comes at a moment when two global trends are colliding with devastating consequences. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be over the age of 60, a proportion expected to double by 2050. At the same time, humanitarian crises driven by conflict, climate change, and disasters are increasing in both number and duration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the biological and social burdens of aging may emerge earlier in life among displaced populations, because chronic undernutrition, trauma, disease, and ageism accelerate physical decline. Yet despite this demographic reality, older people remain largely absent from the design and delivery of humanitarian programming, and older women are the most neglected of all.

To map this landscape of neglect, the research team conducted a global qualitative scoping study, interviewing 19 humanitarian practitioners drawn from 16 organizations working across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. Half of the participating organizations operated at the local level and half internationally, spanning older persons’ organizations, disability-serving groups, and sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence agencies. The researchers used purposive and snowball sampling, guided by a six-member advisory board of experts on older women and women with disabilities in emergencies, and followed COREQ standards for qualitative reporting. Transcripts were double-coded by two analysts, with discrepancies resolved through consensus, and interviews continued until thematic saturation was reached.

The findings paint a picture of layered, mutually reinforcing exclusion. Perhaps the most foundational problem is data: humanitarian needs assessments and monitoring systems routinely fail to disaggregate information by age, sex, and disability, and even when they do, the oldest age brackets are so thinly represented that the full picture cannot be seen. One practitioner described the situation bluntly, noting that data is often not disaggregated at all, and that even when it is, older age groups are not represented well enough to reveal what is actually happening. This statistical erasure has cascading consequences: if older women do not appear in assessments, they do not appear in budgets, program designs, or service delivery plans.

Displacement itself compounds the problem in ways that challenge standard humanitarian assumptions. Practitioners described how older women frequently remain behind during acute emergencies—a choice that is only nominally voluntary. Many feel like a burden and decline to relocate; others want to stay and protect their property, as observed extensively in Ukraine, where massive displacement over years of conflict has left large numbers of older men and women in active combat zones. The study found a striking absence of inclusive evacuation protocols and policies, meaning that those least able to flee are the most likely to be left alone without support, cut off from health services, clean water, adequate food, and safety.

Economic precarity emerged as another central theme, one that both drives and conceals abuse. Aid packages are rarely tailored to older women’s needs, and cash assistance programs often fail them in practice: mobility limitations may prevent travel to distribution points, while digitalized social protection systems create dependency on others to access benefits. That dependency opens the door to exploitation. Practitioners reported cases in which relatives collected money on behalf of older women and then withheld it—a form of financial abuse made possible by the very systems designed to deliver aid. Underlying these structural failures, practitioners identified a corrosive ageist perception that older women, especially those with disabilities, cannot contribute during displacement, leading to the systematic deprioritization of their needs.

The health and protection consequences are severe and, the study argues, deeply interconnected. Older women experience sexual violence, physical assault, denial of resources, and psychological abuse, yet are largely excluded from gender-based violence programming, which is designed primarily for women of reproductive age. Those who live alone are particularly vulnerable, and those who cannot flee are violated in place. Within homes, elder abuse and neglect by caregivers—often daughters-in-law—was reported across settings as diverse as Lebanon, Ukraine, and Indonesia, and remains underreported due to cultural sensitivity and the power families hold over the person being abused. On the health side, practitioners described missed cancer screenings, late-stage cancer diagnoses with no access to treatment or palliative care, elevated rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and unmanaged incontinence, all compounded by weak referral systems and the stigma and shame that keep older women from reporting violence or seeking care.

The researchers frame these barriers through an ecological model, showing how exclusion operates at every level simultaneously. Structurally, the data gap renders older women invisible before any program can be designed. At the institutional and community levels, inaccessible services, mobility limitations, and evacuation failures constrain help-seeking. At the individual level, economic insecurity intensifies dependency on others, which simultaneously increases exposure to abuse and reduces autonomy to escape it. Assumptions that older women are asexual or no longer in need of sexual and reproductive health care silence conversations about menopause, pelvic floor disorders, and conflict-related sexual violence, embedding stigma within the very institutions meant to provide protection.

Crucially, the study does not portray older women solely as victims. Practitioners repeatedly emphasized the vital social roles older women play as caregivers, knowledge holders, and respected community figures. In some settings, an older woman helping a person with disabilities may face fewer questions and receive more community support than an external aid worker. Practitioners described using respected elders as allies to reach younger women and girls, to speak with male leaders, and to guide program design. Older people were identified as effective catalysts for spreading information, teaching skills, and driving income generation—approaches that build sustainable purpose rather than dependency. The study suggests that mixed-age programming, rather than singling out older women, may be particularly promising, and that older women should be included in project leadership, not merely consulted in focus groups.

The authors call for a fundamental reorientation of humanitarian practice: institutionalizing age- and sex-disaggregated data systems with the training and analytic capacity to capture nuanced age bands; designing universally accessible sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence programs; conducting participatory research directly with older women rather than only about them; and partnering with local older persons’ organizations on community-based and intergenerational programming. They also raise an uncomfortable ethical question about how donor-defined metrics of success may lead age-targeted services to be judged unworthy of investment, and argue that humanitarian protection principles—non-discrimination and accessibility for all—demand renewed commitment. As the world ages and crises multiply, the study makes clear that a humanitarian system that cannot see older women cannot claim to be equitable, effective, or ethical.

Subject of Research: Health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings

Article Title: Overlooked health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings: A qualitative study of practitioners

Article References: Falb, K. L., Stevenson, M., Hiscock, D., & Lasater, M. (2026). Overlooked health and protection needs of older women in humanitarian settings: A qualitative study of practitioners. PLOS Aging and Health, 1(3), e0000044. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.page.0000044

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.page.0000044

Keywords: older women, humanitarian crises, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health, ageism, displacement, elder abuse, humanitarian data, economic precarity, qualitative research, aging population, incontinence

The conceptual shift at the heart of the review is deceptively simple but far-reaching. Most research on deprivation, from early town surveys such as Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of poverty to contemporary multidimensional indices developed by Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos, has focused on measuring the extent of poverty: how many people are poor, how deep their deprivation runs, and which dimensions of life it touches. Majumdar argues that for tribal India this approach misses the essential point. The more urgent question is not how much poverty exists but how it is produced and governed. Understanding tribal poverty, the review contends, requires attention to the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice.

The historical roots of this argument reach back to colonial rule. The review traces how the British colonial state dispossessed tribal communities of land, forests and customary rights while simultaneously imposing bureaucratic control, administrative classifications and the criminalisation of resistance. Scholars cited in the review, including historians such as Bhangya Bhukya and Ramachandra Guha, have documented how colonial agrarian and forestry policies enclosed land and forests that tribal communities had long used and governed. In central India, colonial agriculture and forest legislation transformed common resources into state property, and in regions such as the jangalmahal of West Bengal, imperial forest management directly undermined tribal livelihoods. Resistance to these enclosures was met with criminalisation, establishing what the review describes as enduring structures of marginalisation.

Crucially, the review argues that these colonial logics did not end with independence. Postcolonial development and welfare regimes, in Majumdar’s analysis, show continuity as well as transformation. Inclusion can co-exist with exclusion, and development with dispossession. The very categories through which the state administers tribal communities, including the Scheduled Tribe designation and the label of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, carry colonial afterlives. Recent scholarship on the politics of tribalisation in eastern India suggests that state categories created for governance continue to shape identity, entitlement and political struggle long after the contexts that produced them have disappeared. Welfare, in this reading, is never politically neutral: it names its beneficiaries, defines their needs and disciplines their behaviour.

The review then turns to regional experiences to demonstrate that these processes assume differentiated forms across India’s tribal heartlands. In mineral-rich states such as Jharkhand and Odisha, extraction and displacement dominate the picture. Research on development-induced displacement shows that tribal populations have borne a disproportionate share of the costs of mining, dams and industrialisation, losing land and livelihoods while gaining little of the resulting prosperity. Studies of uranium mining at Jadugoda in Jharkhand, co-authored by Majumdar, document the health risks and environmental injustice that accompany such extraction. In Odisha, mining-induced displacement has repeatedly provoked tribal resistance, illustrating how the politics of development is contested on the ground.

Elsewhere, the pathways into marginality run through unequal access to livelihood resources rather than outright displacement. In central India’s tribal belt, scholars have documented the slow erosion of access to land, forests and common resources, a process that converts communities from relatively self-provisioning producers into precarious labourers. In the north-east, questions of land, agriculture and livelihood among Scheduled Tribes intersect with distinctive institutional arrangements, including the Sixth Schedule areas of Meghalaya, where research on the Khasi Hills shows that tribal representation in local land governance shapes outcomes in ways that differ markedly from mainland India. Environmental vulnerability compounds these inequalities: forest-dependent communities face the double burden of restricted access to the resources they once controlled and heightened exposure to ecological degradation.

The review also assembles evidence on the human costs of these political processes, particularly in health and education. Studies of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in Odisha reveal high rates of malnutrition and anaemia, elevated stillbirth and neonatal mortality compared with the general population, and a heavy burden of diseases such as tuberculosis. Health surveys across tribal India document persistent barriers to healthcare access, while research on mental health literacy shows how stigma and weak service provision interact to suppress help-seeking. In education, systematic reviews of girls from Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups identify layered barriers ranging from poverty and distance to language and discrimination. These outcomes, the review insists, should not be read as cultural deficits but as downstream effects of unequal institutional authority and political voice.

What gives the review its analytical coherence is the insistence that these varied pathways are interconnected. Extraction in one region, resource erosion in another, and health and educational exclusion everywhere are not separate problems requiring separate technical fixes. They are, in the article’s framing, distinct expressions of a single underlying dynamic: the reproduction of tribal marginality through political and institutional processes. This dynamic explains a paradox that has long puzzled observers of Indian development, namely how welfare expansion and dispossession can advance simultaneously. When poverty is understood as politically produced, it becomes clear that programmes can deliver benefits to the poor while the structures that generate poverty remain untouched, or are even reinforced by the same administrative apparatus.

The implications for policy are significant. If tribal poverty were primarily a problem of developmental deficit, the solution would be more programmes, better targeting and improved delivery. But if poverty is produced through the unequal distribution of resources, risks, institutional authority and political voice, then effective responses must address those distributions directly. That means strengthening genuine tribal participation in decisions about land, forests and extraction, recognising customary rights rather than merely cataloguing them, and treating tribal communities as political actors rather than passive beneficiaries. It also means scrutinising how welfare itself governs, asking whose categories define vulnerability and whose voices shape the design of interventions. Comparative work by Majumdar on indigenous welfare policies in Taiwan and India suggests that such questions travel across borders, wherever states administer indigenous populations.

The review ultimately offers a broader lesson about the study of poverty everywhere, not only in India. Global scholarship on the politics of poverty governance has increasingly recognised that naming the poor, measuring them and designing programmes for them are themselves exercises of power. Majumdar’s contribution is to apply this insight systematically to India’s tribal communities, connecting colonial history to contemporary welfare and showing how the archive of dispossession continues to structure the present. For a country that has made remarkable progress in reducing measured poverty, the persistence of acute deprivation among its indigenous populations is a standing challenge to triumphalist narratives. The answer, this research suggests, lies not in better statistics but in a more honest account of power: who holds it, how it is exercised, and why the institutions that claim to uplift the marginalised so often reproduce their marginality.

Subject of Research: The political and institutional production of tribal poverty and marginality in India

Article Title: Power, politics and tribal poverty in India

Article References: Majumdar, K. (2026). Power, politics and tribal poverty in India. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01790-1

Keywords: tribal poverty, Adivasis, India, colonialism, dispossession, governance, welfare policy, land rights, displacement, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, social inequality, indigenous justice

The study’s scale is notable for a topic that has often been treated through historical narrative rather than quantitative evidence. Between 2023 and 2024, the researcher surveyed 1,200 respondents spanning Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam, the three macro-regions that experienced the war and its aftermath in markedly different ways. Alongside the survey, 100 semi-structured interviews allowed the study to probe the mechanisms beneath the numbers, following a mixed-methods design in which statistical modeling and qualitative interpretation inform one another. Quantitative responses were analyzed using multiple regression, a technique that estimates the independent effect of each factor on recovery while holding the others constant, while the interview material was examined thematically to surface the social processes that statistics alone cannot capture.

The descriptive findings alone convey how deeply the war penetrated ordinary lives. Among survey respondents, 64.5 percent reported the loss of property or land during or because of the conflict, and 48.2 percent experienced wartime-induced displacement. These are not marginal exposures confined to a small subset of the population; they describe the majority experience of a generation. Displacement, in particular, is known from the disaster and conflict literature to sever the informal networks of kinship, reciprocity, and local knowledge that communities rely on in times of stress, which makes the scale of subsequent recovery in Vietnam all the more striking.

When the researcher modeled recovery as an outcome, wartime exposure emerged as a significant negative predictor, with a standardized coefficient of β = −0.326 at p < 0.001. In plain terms, the more intensely a household or community had been touched by the war, the slower and harder its recovery proved to be, even decades later. This result aligns with a growing body of international evidence on the durable costs of armed conflict, including studies of bombing impacts and long-run economic development in Vietnam itself, and it cautions against romantic narratives of rapid national healing. Wounds inflicted at scale do not simply dissolve with time; they shape trajectories that persist across generations of households.

Yet the model also identified powerful counterweights. Education was a significant positive predictor of recovery, with β = 0.112 at p < 0.001, suggesting that schooling functioned as a form of individual and household capital that translated into better post-war outcomes. Vietnam’s investment in mass education, both before and after reunification, has long been noted by development scholars, and this study adds a resilience dimension to that record: educated respondents appear to have been better equipped to navigate reconstruction, access opportunities, and rebuild livelihoods. Participation in reconstruction efforts was an even stronger positive predictor, with β = 0.187 at p < 0.001, indicating that people who took an active role in rebuilding their communities recovered more fully than those who remained on the sidelines.

That last finding is the conceptual heart of the study. Recovery, the results suggest, was not something done to Vietnamese communities by the state, nor something they achieved alone, but something produced in the interaction between the two. The research frames this through community resilience theory, which treats resilience not as a fixed trait of a group but as a set of capacities, including social trust, social cohesion, and participatory governance, that can be developed, depleted, and deliberately cultivated. In the Vietnamese case, state-led reconstruction programs provided the scaffolding of infrastructure, institutions, and policy, while locally driven efforts supplied the labor, legitimacy, and social energy that made those programs work on the ground.

The qualitative interviews illuminate how this interaction played out in practice. Respondents described the everyday politics of village life, the informal farmers’ groups and neighborhood networks through which people coordinated rebuilding, and the ways local participation shaped how national policies were actually implemented. This echoes a well-documented theme in Vietnamese studies: peasants and local communities did not merely receive policy from above but negotiated, adapted, and sometimes quietly transformed it through everyday practice. The study’s contribution is to connect that historical observation to measurable recovery outcomes, showing that communities with stronger participatory dynamics fared better in the long run.

Three social factors stand out in the analysis as key supports for resilience and long-term recovery: social trust, social cohesion, and participatory governance. Social trust, the confidence that neighbors and institutions will act predictably and fairly, lowers the transaction costs of collective action and makes cooperation possible even among people with limited resources. Social cohesion binds individuals into groups capable of sustained joint effort, from rebuilding homes to restoring farmland. Participatory governance ensures that reconstruction reflects local knowledge and that communities have a stake in decisions that affect them, which in turn reinforces trust and cohesion. Together, these elements form a mutually reinforcing cycle in which successful cooperation builds the social capital needed for the next round of collective effort.

The timing of the study adds another layer of significance. Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms, launched in 1986, marked a decisive turn toward market-oriented economic renewal and are widely credited with transforming the country’s economic trajectory. By integrating the reform era into its analytical framework, the study situates community recovery within a longer arc of state-led transformation, suggesting that the reforms succeeded in part because they tapped into resilient local structures that had survived the war years. The lesson is not simply that markets or state programs lift countries out of poverty, but that recovery accelerates when national initiatives connect with, rather than override, the social fabric of affected communities.

For policymakers and humanitarian organizations working in war-affected settings today, the implications are concrete. Post-conflict reconstruction that focuses exclusively on physical infrastructure or macroeconomic stabilization may miss the social infrastructure that determines whether recovery takes root. The Vietnamese evidence suggests that programs should be designed to strengthen trust and cohesion, create genuine channels for community participation, and invest in education as a long-horizon resilience strategy. It also suggests humility about timelines: the negative effect of wartime exposure was still detectable in a population surveyed nearly half a century after the fighting ended, which means recovery is a generational project, not a five-year plan. As conflicts continue to displace millions around the world, Vietnam’s post-war experience offers a rare, data-rich demonstration that societies can rebuild profoundly, provided the rebuilding engages the communities themselves as active agents rather than passive recipients of aid.

Subject of Research: Community resilience and post-conflict recovery in Vietnam after the Vietnam War

Article Title: Socio-political legacies and community resilience after the Vietnam war: evidence from Vietnam’s post-conflict reconstruction

Article References: Duc, T. M. (2026). Socio-political legacies and community resilience after the Vietnam war: evidence from Vietnam’s post-conflict reconstruction. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01762-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01762-5

Keywords: Vietnam War, community resilience, post-conflict reconstruction, Đổi Mới reforms, social trust, social cohesion, participatory governance, displacement, education, mixed methods, recovery, Vietnam

In an article published in Population and Development Review, Michael Zaslavsky of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Aliakbar Akbaritabar of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the University of Rostock set out to test the assumption of free scholarly mobility under conditions of armed conflict. Their conclusion is pointed. The full-scale invasion certainly made the displacement of Ukrainian researchers visible to the world, but the data show that researchers were already leaving conflict-affected regions for other parts of Ukraine and for destinations abroad after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fighting erupted in the Donbas in 2014. Scholarly mobility during war, the authors argue, cannot simply be understood as a matter of individual choice.

The methodological core of the study is as elegant as it is ambitious. Rather than relying on surveys or administrative records, which are difficult to collect in wartime and often unavailable at fine geographic resolution, the researchers turned to one of the richest digital trails that scholars leave behind: their scientific publications. Every paper records the institutional affiliations of its authors — the universities, research institutes, and other organizations to which they are professionally connected. By examining affiliation data for tens of thousands of researchers, region by region, and tracking how those affiliations changed between 2009 and 2022, the authors were able to estimate scholarly mobility across more than a decade at an unusually fine geographical level.

This bibliometric approach has real technical advantages. Publication records are continuously produced, publicly available, and timestamped, which means they capture movements as they happen rather than retrospectively. They also cover researchers who might never appear in migration statistics, including those who move between institutions within a country without ever crossing a border. The trade-off, which the authors acknowledge, is that publication histories reveal when and where a scholar’s institutional base changed, but not why any individual moved. Still, aggregated across tens of thousands of careers, the affiliation trail offers a powerful lens on how a national research system reorganizes itself under the pressure of war.

The results reveal a redrawing of Ukraine’s scholarly map after 2014 — but not a single uniform pattern. Between 2015 and 2017, Donetsk and Luhansk, the two main regions of the Donbas, were losing researchers on balance to other parts of Ukraine. For every 1,000 actively publishing scholars, roughly 54 more researchers were leaving than arriving in Donetsk, and about 46 more in Luhansk. These are substantial net losses for regions that historically anchored significant parts of the country’s research capacity, and they occurred while armed conflict was actively disrupting the institutions those researchers depended on.

When the authors examined mobility across national borders, Crimea stood out most sharply. International migration there produced a net loss of approximately 117 researchers per 1,000 actively publishing scholars. Donetsk also recorded a substantial international loss, at about 66 per 1,000. Behind these headline figures, however, different dynamics were at work. In some regions, the imbalance arose because more researchers left for institutions abroad; in others, it reflected fewer arrivals from other countries. Even so, the overall direction was consistent: more scholars left than arrived in the east of the country, and the changes were not confined to the territories directly touched by fighting.

That last finding may be the study’s most consequential. War, the data suggest, was associated not only with researchers leaving Ukraine but also with changes in how those who remained were distributed within the country. Internal relocation — from contested or destabilized regions toward other Ukrainian regions — operated alongside international emigration, meaning that the geography of Ukrainian science was being reorganized from within even as the country lost researchers abroad. Any account that reduces the phenomenon to brain drain, the authors argue, misses this internal dimension entirely. Scholars did not simply exit; they moved between regions, and those movements redistributed expertise in ways that will shape regional research capacity for years to come.

One result genuinely surprised the research team. The expectation going in was that more developed regions would retain their own researchers and attract new ones, functioning as safe havens of academic activity. Instead, the authors found that these regions could also be places from which scholars were better able to relocate. Zaslavsky offers a possible explanation: researchers based in better-connected, more developed regions tend to have stronger links to other research institutions, and therefore more opportunities to move when crisis hits. In other words, the very resources that make a region academically strong may also make its scholars more mobile — a finding that complicates any simple mapping of conflict impact onto regional disadvantage.

The study’s implications extend well beyond Ukraine. Because researchers carry knowledge, professional networks, and opportunities for collaboration with them, where they move matters for both the places they leave and the places that receive them. Qualifications and international connections, the authors emphasize, do not necessarily protect researchers from forced displacement — nor do they guarantee that those who want to leave can actually do so. Wartime scholarly migration, on this evidence, is shaped by constraint as much as by opportunity, and treating it as a free market of talent misrepresents the reality on the ground.

There is also a practical lesson for how the research community monitors and responds to crises. Publicly available bibliometric data, the authors argue, can complement surveys, administrative records, and qualitative research, helping to track where research systems are losing scholars and where those researchers are relocating while a crisis is still unfolding. Such knowledge is not merely descriptive. When countries eventually face the task of rebuilding research communities and institutions after conflict, knowing which regions lost scholars, which absorbed them, and which lost them across borders becomes essential groundwork for reconstruction. For Ukraine, a country whose scholarly map has now been redrawn twice — after 2014 and again after 2022 — that groundwork has already begun.

Subject of Research: Internal and international migration of researchers in Ukraine during armed conflict, 2009 to 2022

Article Title: Tracking researchers in Ukraine through war and armed conflict:

Article References: Tracking researchers in Ukraine through war and armed conflict:. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Ukraine, scholarly mobility, armed conflict, bibliometrics, brain drain, Donbas, Crimea, research migration, demography, Population and Development Review, displacement, research systems