In 2011, protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime quickly escalated into a full-scale armed conflict between anti-government rebel groups and the Syrian government. Outside parties have significantly intervened, particularly as the self-proclaimed Islamic State expanded from Iraq into Syria.

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Yemen continues to be devastated by fighting between government loyalists and Houthi rebels sparked by the 2011 uprising that transferred power from former President Ali Abdullah Saleh to Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. Ethnic Houthi rebels from northern Yemen exploited the central government’s weak influence and seized Sanaa in 2014. South Yemen’s separatist militias continue their violent push for secession.

The seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a dispute over the land that makes up present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Overthrown in 2001 by a U.S.-led military campaign, the Taliban has since waged an insurgency against the internationally backed Afghan government, resulting in widespread displacement and destruction, including significant physical threats and restrictions for Afghan women.

Sudan

Darfur

Nepal

Guatemala’s 1996 peace accords concluded a bloody thirty-six-year civil war. The negotiated cease-fire reached between government forces and leftist insurgent groups ended a conflict in which over two hundred thousand civilians—primarily indigenous Mayans—were killed or forcibly disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. In the early 1980s, at the height of the conflict, over six thousand armed combatants fought a guerrilla war, supported by between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand loyalists to the four principal guerrilla groups involved.

Between the late 1960s and 1990s, in an era known as the Troubles, Northern Ireland experienced significant violence that pitted the historically dominant British Protestant unionists against the Irish Catholic nationalists.