Western states are doing little to stop or dissuade their citizens from going. The sight of scores of young men traveling abroad to fight for a righteous cause with little except for feeble statements to temper their enthusiasm is again unsettlingly reminiscent of the early days of the Libyan and Syrian revolutions.

William Nordhaus (2018: 345, 359), estimates that ‘damages are 2.1 percent of global income at 3°C warming and 8.5 percent of income at 6°C’, while also warning that the longer the delay in taking decisive action, the harsher the necessary countermeasures.

Those interventions seem distant from the reality in Viento Libre, where teachers suggest a different set of solutions: opportunities, food, and basic well-being. “We need to work on prevention,” said Lucia, a teacher of older students. “We need to show these children other examples.” For now, few examples are in sight outside the walls of the classroom.

Although schools are open again and lockdowns lifted, recruitment’s momentum is proving difficult to stop. Indigenous authorities in Cauca said armed groups have already penetrated community life. More and more families have a member who has been recruited or joined, rendering them in various ways dependent on the armed groups for economic survival. Anyone who dares to speak out faces serious repercussions.

As they swept across new areas, they found untended and bored young people wherever they looked. Outside large cities, few students had access to internet or any sort of virtual classes, so when schools closed, teachers could only provide occasional paper lessons and worksheets. Professors lost touch with pupils in some cases. Armed groups stepped in to fill young peoples’ free time. “They created football clubs, taught classes—many students stopped their official studies and chose a different path,” said a female Indigenous leader from Caloto municipality. “The students who [stayed] with their [virtual] studies were threatened.”

Commanders displaced hostile populations, rewarded loyal constituencies with NGO development projects, and attacked opponents under the guise of disarmament and demobilization campaigns. If in Juba the international community dined out on imported wine and mozzarella in restaurants next to the Nile, in the rest of the country, the civil war continued.

Oil revenues and donor funds went into the pockets of commanders who built a rentier economy predicated on the redistribution of external income to armed supporters.

Rebel movements in Sudan have always been reliant on manipulating external supporters. Garang could appear Marxist to the SPLM’s Ethiopian backers and then, following tectonic regional shifts and the collapse of the Derg regime in Addis Ababa, miraculously become the paragon of national self-determination that his American cheerleaders wished him to be.

Suddenly, it was no longer responsive to the communities that had brought it legitimacy in the first place. Within four years, having expanded too rapidly and been beset by accusations of corruption, LPI effectively closed all its programs in the DRC.

I wonder if they are trying to have us start a war so that we finally get aid projects!

The local simply offers an immediate unproblematic moral good onto which they can grasp to justify their work. Just as James Scambary could be cloaked in self-righteousness for living among the locals, so too can the entire industry save its soul through local peacebuilding.

Still, Van der Lijn, the researcher, called such programmes an “afterthought”. He said European states “refuse to condition” their military support on respect for human rights in Niger and neighbouring countries because they “fear losing influence” to new actors in the region, such as Russia.

Despite the abuses, a lot more funds are likely to be invested in Niger as its geopolitical influence grows. The country is expected to become the main hub for foreign forces in the Sahel as France closes its military bases in neighbouring Mali – part of a wider restructuring of its regional military footprint that is already underway.