Venezuela’s prolonged political and economic unraveling continues to reshape not just the country itself but the wider region, as one of the largest displacement crises in the world unfolds largely outside the international spotlight. Years of contested elections, economic mismanagement, and hyperinflation have hollowed out state institutions and driven a substantial share of the population to leave the country altogether.

Disputed presidential elections have repeatedly failed to produce a resolution accepted by both the government and the opposition, with allegations of fraud, opposition figures barred from running, and international observers denied meaningful access. Each electoral cycle has deepened the country’s political impasse rather than resolving it, leaving Venezuela’s institutions increasingly concentrated around the ruling party with limited space for organized political opposition.

Economically, despite periods of relative stabilization following the worst years of hyperinflation, the broader picture remains bleak. Oil production, once the backbone of the Venezuelan economy, continues to operate well below its historic capacity due to years of underinvestment, sanctions, and mismanagement of state oil infrastructure. Basic services, from electricity to healthcare, remain unreliable across large parts of the country, and public sector wages have failed to keep pace with the cost of living.

The result has been sustained outward migration on a scale rarely seen outside active war zones. Millions of Venezuelans have left in recent years, settling primarily in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Chile, with growing numbers attempting the dangerous overland route north through the Darien Gap toward the United States. Host countries across Latin America, many already managing their own economic pressures, have struggled to absorb the scale of arrivals, straining public services and, in some cases, fueling political backlash against migrants.

Sanctions policy has added another layer of complexity. Shifts in sanctions relief tied to electoral conditions have alternately opened and closed opportunities for oil exports, creating economic uncertainty that ripples through household incomes and further complicates any prospect of a negotiated political transition.

Venezuela’s crisis shares clear parallels with other cases of governance collapse and mass displacement across the hemisphere, including Haiti, where a similarly fractured political landscape has fueled both internal displacement and outward migration under very different but comparably destabilizing conditions. For more on how governance breakdown is driving displacement elsewhere in the region, see our coverage of Haiti’s ongoing collapse.

Absent a negotiated political settlement that both sides accept as legitimate, Venezuela’s economic and migration pressures are likely to persist, continuing to shape politics and public services across much of Latin America.

Ethiopia’s fragile post-Tigray peace has been undercut by a separate, escalating conflict in the Amhara region, where Fano militias, once allied with federal forces during the Tigray war, have turned against the government in Addis Ababa. What began as scattered resistance to federal disarmament efforts has grown into a sustained insurgency that now touches large parts of the region, including areas near historically significant cities and infrastructure.

Fano’s grievances center on a mix of ethnic-nationalist and political concerns, including opposition to constitutional changes affecting regional boundaries, resentment over the terms of the Tigray peace deal, and broader dissatisfaction with the federal government’s handling of Amhara interests. In response, Ethiopia’s federal defense forces have launched repeated counteroffensives, but Fano’s decentralized, locally rooted structure has made it difficult to dislodge.

The conflict escalated further around Ethiopia’s most recent federal elections, which Fano factions explicitly sought to disrupt, viewing them as illegitimate given the ongoing state of emergency and restricted political space in the region. Attacks on electoral infrastructure and personnel increased sharply in the months leading up to the vote, and the government’s efforts to secure the process led to further militarization of civilian areas.

Civilians have borne the brunt of the fighting. Reports from rights monitors describe civilian casualties spread across multiple zones of the Amhara region, alongside mass arrests of ethnic Amhara individuals in Addis Ababa and other cities, with thousands reportedly held in unregistered detention facilities. Access for independent journalists and humanitarian organizations to conflict-affected areas has remained heavily restricted, making it difficult to verify the full scope of casualties and displacement.

The Amhara conflict does not exist in isolation. It sits alongside continued instability in Oromia, unresolved tensions from the Tigray war, and a broader pattern of regional and ethnic conflict that has repeatedly tested Ethiopia’s federal system since 2020. Analysts warn that the country’s multiple, simultaneous conflicts risk reinforcing one another, straining the federal government’s capacity to respond to any single emergency effectively while eroding public trust in the state’s ability to govern fairly across its diverse regions.

International attention to the Amhara conflict has lagged behind its scale, in part because access restrictions limit independent reporting. Rights organizations continue to press for accountability and access, with recent assessments noting that continued conflict and restricted humanitarian access remain central concerns for the country.

Without a negotiated resolution addressing Fano’s core grievances, the conflict is likely to continue grinding on, further complicating Ethiopia’s already difficult path toward durable, region-wide stability.

Haiti’s steady collapse into gang rule has turned much of Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas into territory effectively governed by armed groups rather than the state. What began as fragmented gang violence following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise has metastasized into a coordinated insurgency capable of overrunning police stations, prisons, ports, and government buildings, leaving Haiti’s transitional authorities with only a fraction of the territory they nominally control.

Estimates suggest that armed factions now control the large majority of the capital, and their reach has steadily expanded into the surrounding Artibonite region, once considered the country’s breadbasket. Kidnappings for ransom, extortion of businesses, and control of key roads have become central to how these groups fund themselves and extend their power, while ordinary Haitians face displacement on a massive scale. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, many crowding into informal displacement sites with little access to clean water, food, or medical care.

The international response has struggled to keep pace. A multinational security support mission, led by Kenyan police and backed by a handful of other countries, was deployed to bolster Haiti’s overwhelmed national police force, but it has arrived with limited personnel, funding, and equipment relative to the scale of the crisis. Haiti’s own police force, meanwhile, remains undermanned and, in some cases, outgunned by the very groups it is meant to confront.

Politically, Haiti has been without an elected government for years, governed instead by a transitional council tasked with organizing elections that have been repeatedly delayed amid the security collapse. That governance vacuum has made it exceedingly difficult to coordinate humanitarian response, rebuild basic services, or plan any long-term recovery, since there is no stable authority capable of implementing reforms or securing sustained international investment.

The regional consequences are also mounting. Neighboring countries, particularly the Dominican Republic, have tightened border controls and stepped up deportations in response to Haitian migration, while other countries across the Americas have seen a rise in Haitian asylum claims as people search for any viable escape route.

Haiti’s crisis illustrates how quickly state collapse can accelerate once security, governance, and economic systems break down simultaneously, and how difficult it becomes to reverse without a sustained, well-resourced international commitment. We examine cases like this, where fragile governance intersects with organized violence, as part of our broader work across Latin America, where similar pressures around organized crime and weak state capacity are increasingly shaping the region’s stability.

Without a dramatic shift in either domestic capacity or international support, Haiti’s path back toward functional governance remains deeply uncertain.

Yemen’s civil war, now well into its second decade, rarely makes international headlines, yet it remains one of the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies. The conflict pits the Houthi movement, which controls much of the north including the capital Sanaa, against a fractured array of government-aligned forces backed at various points by outside regional powers. A fragile, informal truce has held down the intensity of front-line fighting in recent years, but it has done little to resolve the underlying political stalemate or ease the suffering of ordinary Yemenis.

The numbers are difficult to grasp. Roughly half of Yemen’s population, more than twenty million people, is projected to need humanitarian assistance this year. Food insecurity has deepened in several districts to emergency and even catastrophic levels, and more than two million children under five are acutely malnourished. Yemen’s health system has been decimated by years of conflict and underinvestment; two out of every five health facilities in the country are no longer functioning, leaving millions without reliable access to care, including hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who need life-saving maternal services.

Compounding the crisis is a severe funding shortfall. International humanitarian appeals for Yemen have been chronically underfunded, with recent appeals receiving less than a third of the money requested. That shortfall has forced aid agencies to cut rations, close clinics, and in some cases withdraw staff entirely from areas under Houthi control, where operating conditions have grown more restrictive and dangerous.

The political track has fared little better than the humanitarian one. UN-led mediation efforts have produced incremental confidence-building steps, prisoner exchanges, partial reopening of roads, and discussions over a broader roadmap, but a comprehensive peace agreement remains out of reach. The Houthis have also drawn Yemen further into the wider regional conflict by launching attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, inviting retaliatory strikes and complicating an already fragile domestic truce.

Yemen’s war has always been shaped as much by outside intervention as by internal politics, and that remains true today. Any lasting settlement will likely require not just an agreement between Yemeni factions but also a broader regional understanding among the surrounding powers with a stake in the outcome. As the United Nations recently emphasized, urgent action is needed to both advance peace talks and address the country’s deepening hunger crisis before conditions deteriorate further.

For now, Yemen remains a stark example of how a conflict can persist for years with declining international attention even as the humanitarian need grows more acute.

The war in Gaza, now years removed from its October 2023 starting point, has become one of the defining humanitarian and political crises of this decade. Repeated ceasefire agreements have paused the fighting only to collapse under the weight of unresolved questions: who governs Gaza once the guns fall silent, what happens to the remaining hostages and prisoners, and whether a genuine pathway toward Palestinian statehood exists at all.

The physical toll on Gaza has been staggering. Large sections of Gaza City and the strip’s other urban centers have been reduced to rubble, and the population has been displaced multiple times, often into ever-shrinking areas with limited access to food, clean water, and medical care. International aid organizations have repeatedly warned of famine-like conditions in parts of the territory, even as access for aid convoys has remained inconsistent and contested.

Politically, the war has exposed deep fractures. Within Israel, the conflict has fueled sustained domestic protest over the fate of hostages and the direction of the war, alongside debate over the future of settlements and annexation in the West Bank, where violence and land seizures have also risen sharply. Among Palestinians, Hamas’s ability to govern Gaza has been shattered, but no alternative administration commands broad legitimacy, leaving a governance vacuum that outside mediators have struggled to fill.

Regionally, the war has strained relationships that once seemed to be stabilizing. Normalization talks between Israel and some Gulf states slowed considerably after the war began, while Iran-aligned groups in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq have used the conflict to justify continued attacks on Israeli and shipping targets, drawing in naval forces from several countries to protect Red Sea trade routes.

Mediation efforts led by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States have produced periodic breakthroughs, including hostage-for-prisoner exchanges and temporary humanitarian pauses, but a comprehensive postwar plan remains elusive. Proposals for international stabilization forces, Palestinian Authority reform, and phased Israeli withdrawal have all been floated, yet none has secured buy-in from all the necessary parties.

What is clear is that the conflict’s resolution will not be purely military. Any lasting peace will require decisions about governance, reconstruction financing, security guarantees, and the political future of both Gaza and the West Bank. Those questions cut across humanitarian relief, security policy, and diplomacy, which is part of why we track this conflict alongside other cross-cutting conflict themes in our thematic issues program, rather than in isolation.

Until a durable political arrangement emerges, the war in Gaza is likely to remain both a humanitarian emergency and a persistent source of regional instability.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, remains the largest and most consequential war on European soil since 1945. What began as an attempt to seize Kyiv within days has instead settled into one of the most attritional conflicts of the modern era, reshaping European security, energy markets, and alliance structures in ways that will likely outlast the fighting itself.

The front lines have shifted repeatedly over the years, but the core dynamics have stayed consistent: Russia relies on manpower, artillery, and glide bombs to grind forward in the east and south, while Ukraine has increasingly turned to long-range drones to strike deep inside Russian territory, hitting oil refineries, military plants, and logistics hubs far from the front. That shift has forced Moscow to divert air defenses inward and has begun to strain domestic fuel supplies in parts of Russia, even as Ukrainian cities continue to absorb waves of missile and drone bombardment.

Diplomatically, the war has proven remarkably resistant to resolution. Multiple rounds of talks have produced ceasefires for narrow issues, such as prisoner exchanges or strikes on energy infrastructure, but no durable settlement on territory or security guarantees. Kyiv has insisted it will not cede land by force, while Moscow has shown no sign of abandoning its territorial claims in the regions it says it has annexed, despite controlling only parts of them.

The human cost continues to climb. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded, and millions of Ukrainians remain displaced, either internally or as refugees across Europe. Civilian infrastructure, especially the power grid, has been targeted repeatedly, leaving millions to endure blackouts through freezing winters.

The war’s ripple effects have reordered European defense policy. NATO members have sharply increased military spending, Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of neutrality to join the alliance, and European governments have raced to rebuild defense-industrial capacity that atrophied after the Cold War. Global grain and energy markets remain sensitive to developments in the Black Sea and Russian energy infrastructure.

What happens next depends on factors well beyond the battlefield: the durability of Western military and financial support, the state of Russia’s war economy, and whether either side concludes that further fighting is more costly than compromise. For now, neither government appears ready to make that calculation. As one recent report noted, Russia’s economy may be feeling the strain, but that alone hasn’t been enough to end the war.

We continue to track how this conflict is reshaping alliances, energy politics, and the broader security architecture of Europe, since its outcome will influence how future territorial disputes are contested and resolved well beyond Ukraine’s borders.