In this series of Working Papers, IPI has asked leading experts to undertake a mapping exercise, presenting an assessment of critical challenges to human and international security. A first group of papers provides a horizontal perspective, examining the intersection of multiple challenges in specific regions of the world. A second group takes a vertical approach, providing in-depth analysis of global challenges relating to organized violence, poverty, population trends, public health, and climate change, among other topics.

The Working Papers have three main objectives:

1) to advance the understanding of these critical challenges and their interlinkages;
2) to assess capacities to cope with these challenges and to draw scenarios for plausible future developments; and
3) to offer a baseline for longer-term research and policy development.

• Food Security: Vulnerability Despite Abundance
• Global Public Health and Biosecurity: Managing Twenty-First Century Risks
• Population Trends: Humanity in Transition
• Poverty and Conflict: The Inequality Link
• Climate Change and Conflict: The Migration Link
• Energy Security: Investment or Insecurity
• Global Terrorism: Multilateral Responses to an Extraordinary Threat
• Transnational Organized Crime: Multilateral Responses to a Rising Threat
• Nuclear Weapons: The Politics of Non-Proliferation
• Small Arms and Light Weapons: Towards Global Public Policy
• Ending Wars and Building Peace
• New Challenges for Peacekeeping: the War on Terror
• Peacemaking and Mediation: Dynamics of a Changing Field
• Global Political Violence: Explaining the Post-Cold War Decline
• Latin America and the Caribbean: Domestic and Transnational Insecurity
• Europe: Crises of Identity
• Central Asia and the Caucasus: A Vulnerable Crescent
• Asia: Towards Security Cooperation
• Africa: Confronting Complex Threats
• The Middle East: Fragility and Crisis