Over 4 million refugees have fled Syria since the outbreak of the crisis and the armed conflicts in 2011. The overwhelming majority of these people have been hosted by Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey in what has been described by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as 'the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era'. The crisis has created a set of fundamental policy challenges, including how to ensure ongoing protection in host countries with overwhelmed response capacities.

In August 2008, the impoverished urban townships in Harare’s metropolitan area were engulfed by a devastating cholera outbreak. The disease rapidly spread into peri-urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country’s borders into South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique.

The main theories of oil conflicts, defined by Martinez-Alier (2002) and Escobar (2008) as ecological and cultural distribution conflicts, and influential in the study of Latin American indigenous movements (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010), postulate that indigenous people, because of their ecological and cultural ‘difference’ (Escobar 2008) – a special attachment to the environment as a provider of livelihood or cultural identity – oppose oil extraction projects which threaten these environments.