Raleigh Report - February 2026

“You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” — TomTom

This month, I was going to reflect on chaos creep. This is a phenomenon where everything continues to go wrong, but in the public realm. It is the natural endpoint to an era when elites have spoken — with straight and worried faces — about an “omnicrisis.” But then the same people who blathered on about “omnicrisis” (I presume this can’t be plural, because by its nature it subsumes all the crises into one, right?) have now turned into people with spreadsheets proving that you are wrong if you are worried about anything they care about! There is no winning that argument: I both wield spreadsheets and think everything is going wrong. Instead,  let’s chat about  “obsolete” conflict studies.

It all started innocently enough: I read this piece on “The Demise of Conflict Studies” by noted scholars Wolfram Lacher and Yvan Guichaoua. Reader, I hated it. It represented the most tone-deaf, insulated, navel-gazing, defeatist, irresponsible, ancient-history referencing, self-serving academic nonsense I had hoped would never see the light of day. The context they lay out is exactly right: It starts with “an entire industry specializing in mediation, peacekeeping, disarmament, or transitional justice has become largely obsolete.” This is correct: You would only think otherwise if you lived under a rock, it was 2002, and you were spending the summer in Oslo’s Centre for the Study of Civil War (RIP). Otherwise, yes, it is obsolete. But why is it so?

The article does an excellent job of showcasing our general uselessness — although this was unintentional. The authors seem to assert — bafflingly — that conflict studies are obsolete because we are no longer allowed to be pointless. Like, waffling on about our “positionality” should be a protected characteristic, come with a guaranteed job, and — this is the most important part — elite status to designate what is “right” and what is “wrong” in how other people pursue conflict analysis. It isn’t that the subject or analysis is obsolete — both the authors and many others have produced incisive, interesting, and relevant work. Their main problem is that they don’t care for their audience, who have rejected the obsolete work, and may be using actual conflict analysis in pursuit of goals that the authors don’t morally abide by. Indeed, “elites” and “powers” are not self-immolating for being involved in politics!    

They take aim at key authors from the late 1990s as the reason this all went wrong. They note that the work of Mary Kaldor, Paul Collier, and Anke Hoeffler amounted to “unsophisticated approaches.” This is despite the fact that, if any conflict books outside of the narrow field were read, they were authored by these people. Further, this “unsophisticated” comment reminds me of  a theory I have about people and their hairstyles and/or choice of personal fashion: People keep their hair in the style they had during the period of their life when they were happiest. Applied to academics, it means scholars mainly reference their peers and the theories they challenged best at the height of their careers. So no, it is not Anke, Mary, or Paul’s fault that things have gone awry: It is that we became — actually, we insisted on becoming — totally irrelevant.  

This happened in two distinct but concurrent ways, largely corresponding to which methodological camp you lived in: If you were quantitative (where I would include myself), we have been on a steady diet of increasingly removed and pointless statistical tests. God forbid you would say something interesting or, even worse, “unempirical.” Christ alive, don’t touch anything that can’t be generalized or reproduced in (never actually happening) identical contexts. Have you done a randomized control for people joining militias as if you were testing a new blood pressure medication? No, that is impossible? Then don’t study that. For the love of god, make sure you have every single version of an idea that you would ever hope to dream of, and officially “deposit” those stated ideas in a public vault before you undertake the tests, just so you have absolutely no room to experiment or investigate anything outside of those pre-tested concepts.

It was like undertaking a study in a straitjacket, all to underscore the false premise that social science is like chemistry or physics. The process and procedures are far more important than the subject or conclusion, which are — without fail — overly specified/narrow and completely banal/boring. This camp came with an unwritten rule: Never say anything insightful or of interest about the world’s most compelling subject (case in point, I once got in trouble with a reviewer — and I know exactly who it was — who disagreed with my description of something as “insightful” because “what is insight?”). 

In the qualitative camp, it is safe to say that people collectively lost their bloody minds. Real internecine wars happened here, mainly in forms of inverted racism, ageism, sexism, and position-ism. In the past, qualitative studies would have been a few fun hot takes like “I will only view conflict from the prism of the Cuban politburo” (which would be a little bit interesting), or my personal favorite was when a leading Africanist turned to a junior scholar and insisted that “Nigeria does not exist” while she presented her work on Boko Haram. No, the qualitative camp became obsolete because they made themselves the story, only wrote for and as the worst critics,  and then ripped each other limb from limb. By making “their truth” the center of their work, they committed the ultimate analysis sin. No one cares about your carefully cultivated “truth,” a sentiment undoubtedly echoed by many a romantic partner. When “quals” weren’t doing that, they were insisting that any violently marauding group was engaged in “rebel governance,” instead of acknowledging that rebel leaders — nine times out of 10 — are like teenage girls in how they see the world and their competitors (never a more glorious and vicious species walked the earth). 

The qualitative camp did not suffer because they were descriptive — everyone loves minutiae. I love nothing more than a totally pointless anecdote about conflict from an active rebel. Is it useful? No, quite unlikely. But it shows texture, knowledge, and that you have so much information — and you think so deeply about this conflict — that you cannot sort out the woods from the trees. But no one wants to hear this — they want to hear your assessment, your whole interpretation of significance and likely futures. Yet, writing an unbiased, balanced, and independent assessment, analysis, or projection, based on your knowledge and for an actual audience, is what you are actively hounded for by other academics for at least the past decade. Outside of academia, you can be entirely and infuriatingly sanctimonious with a pseudo-morality about conflict, but don’t whinge about it when you are at best ignored, and at worst, derided. On the other hand, surely we could just do our job, know something about an obscure subject, and analyze it like it weren’t all about us. If we don’t, we deserve where we are. 

At the end, to really round out their argument, the authors go heretic hunting by basically saying, “you are dead to us if we disagree on Gaza.”  So, that is that, then. 

Notes and notions

The dumpster fire that is the Starmer government is always best described by Ailbhe Rea of The New Statesman (they also have a daily podcast where she appears to discuss her fantastically observant and insightful articles). See here. Ailbhe is also Irish, so even better. Although, having just thrown himself on the pyre, Starmer’s closest advisor and the one responsible for the Mandelson fiasco is also Irish (we can’t win them all).

Universities becoming elaborate and expensive adult-child-care is a real and deep problem, and they only have themselves to blame.

Half term is almost upon us, and the children will be treated to a showing of Les Misérables, which they are actively fighting. But it will provide a break from these brilliant videos on everything from nuclear power to how antibiotics work.

This boy is genuinely incredible. What a little soldier. 

A stampede of “feral” camels occurred in Australia. Once I set up my camel center, I hope to contain these caravans. I have been assured by a lot of people that there isn’t a huge need for a random woman to shepherd camels, but this event has vindicated me. 

My brother lived in a Minneapolis suburb for a while after he left the Marines, and he once commented to me that the local police had material and military hardware that he recognized from his tours in Iraq. As with all military hardware, if you have it, you will use it. So the local police were over-kitted for their remit, and it had the effect of conflating policing with military-like operations. I thought about that as I looked at this analysis from The New York Times. When coupled with a poorly and briefly trained ICE force, this is a metastasizing disaster. There are very good reasons that people would presume that ICE is operating like a paramilitary unit — like most militias, it is undisciplined, acting with seeming impunity at the behest of a political elite (Kristi Noem), and linked to regime survival politics that casts civilians as the enemy. Everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and face drastic consequences. In another case of utter shamelessness and incompetence, look no further than the head of the FBI.

I've officially joined the podcast revolution (yes, another one — you're welcome). In our latest Conflicts of Interest, Dr. Caitriona Dowd and I discuss whether the Saudi–UAE rift is bigger than it looks. Spoiler: It is, and literally no one is talking about it. Streaming on all platforms.

ACLED webinars

Webinar | Inside Yemen’s south: Contested governance, regional competition, and al-Qaeda’s role

To coincide with our upcoming report, “Al-Qaeda’s ‘new normal’ in Yemen: strategic continuity despite a leadership change,” ACLED is hosting a webinar on Thursday, 12 February, at 5 p.m. AST | 2 p.m. GMT | 9 a.m. EST. Join us for an in-depth panel discussion with the author of the report, Dr. Luca Nevola, ACLED’s Senior Analyst for Yemen and the Gulf; Mundher Basalma, Political Economy Expert; and Hend Omairan, Policy and Advocacy Specialist, on the ongoing crisis in southern Yemen, the key players involved, and what is at stake. Register now to secure your spot. 

Webinar | Jihadist escalation in the Benin, Niger, and Nigeria border triangle

Since 2024, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and the Islamic State Sahel Province have expanded their violent campaigns beyond the central Sahel, reshaping the security landscape of the Benin, Niger, and Nigeria borderlands. Join ACLED on Thursday, 26 February, at 2 p.m. GMT | 3 p.m. CET for a closer look.  Register here.

ACLED in the media

• Tiziano Breda was quoted in this AP News article about the pressures confronting Latin American leaders.
• I spoke to The Washington Post about the danger posed when states are no longer treated as independent states with their own political agency for an article on Trump’s military strikes during his second term. They also used our data for their article “Mapping U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.”
• Olha Polishchuk shared her insights with Al Jazeera about the sabotage campaign being carried out by the Ukrainian resistance movement, Atesh, against Russia.
• The Guardian interviewed Su Mon for her insights on the recent elections in Myanmar and used ACLED data in this picture essay, while Time used ACLED data in this article.
• Ladd Serwat spoke to Deutsche Welle about the phenomenon of armed groups using Nigeria's forest reserves as bases.
• Andrea Carboni appeared as a guest speaker on this Voice of Islam podcast about targeted attacks on health care facilities around the world.

Our Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia Researcher, Marc Español, wrote an article for El País on drone warfare in Sudan.