(US) Africa Command, have resulted in further civilian deaths and widespread abuses. Civilians have also been targeted or faced indiscriminate attacks during inter-clan violence in several regions. Midway through 2018, renewed armed conflict between the Somaliland and Puntland regional governments uprooted at least 12,500 people, while across the country more than 2.6 million remain displaced. South Sudan remains on the precipice of another round of brutal violence. Despite a September 2018 agreement between the government and the main opposition group to enter into a power-sharing arrangement, conflict has ebbed but not ended. Forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar remain responsible for depredations against civilians including unlawful killings, torture, sexual violence, and use and recruitment of child soldiers. Efforts to hold to account perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity via a Hybrid Court for South Sudan have been obstructed. Particularly in former Unity State, famine has also exacerbated fatal inter-ethnic violence between Dinka, Nuer and Muerle communities seeking to acquire cattle and pastureland. While internet coverage is low even in population centres, civil society actors have suggested that social media literacy could accelerate peace efforts. Still, lasting peace remains distant and threatened by opportunistic manoeuvring by the main parties. While Iraq remains prone to further outbreaks of violence, the Twitter hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS – previously used to amplify propaganda and generate a climate of fear as the group conquered swathes of the country – has lost much of its currency. While the Iraqi military, and affiliated mainly Shi’a sectarian militias, Kurdish forces and the US-led international coalition continue to clash with ISIS fighters in rural holdouts, the group has been reduced mainly to operating sleeper cells and launching terrorist attacks in population centres. While 2018 saw the lowest number of civilian casualties in Iraq since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, approximately 1.8 million Iraqis are still internally displaced, and deep socio-political fault lines have yet to be resolved. Particularly in Nineva and Anbar, where ISIS drew significant support, civilians continue to face harsh measures amounting to collective punishment by security forces, including arbitrary detentions and torture. Iraqi judges have prosecuted thousands of ISIS suspects based on flawed procedures, although some improvements have been made. Peoples under Threat 2019 In the wake of a rigged and long-delayed election in December 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remains riven by conflict and instability. More than 140 armed groups, including government security forces and militias based in neighbouring countries, are active in central and eastern Congo. Various forces, including the Congolese army, have committed atrocities including massacres and recruitment of child soldiers. The year 2018 also saw an upsurge of violence in north-eastern Ituri province, where ethnic Lendu armed groups clashed with ethnic Hema and the Congolese army. The country holds more than 5 million displaced people from within and outside its borders, representing Africa’s largest displacement crisis. Authorities in Kinshasa have engineered internet and social media bans to assist in denying the severity of Congo’s enduring mismanagement and insecurity. Looking towards an uncertain future, Sudan sits high in the Peoples under Threat table. Mass antiausterity demonstrations in late 2018 led, nearly four months later, to the end of President Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade reign. A prominent mobilizing and organizing role was played by social media – banned but still accessible through virtual private networks (VPNs) – which rallied protesters around an iconic video of a young female activist that went viral globally. Steps towards a civilian-led transitional government have been tentative, with a military council attempting to take control and confronting ongoing demonstrations with deadly force. It remains to be seen whether Bashir will one day be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for atrocity crimes against Darfur’s non-Arab ethnic groups. Fighting is ongoing in Darfur’s Jebel Marra region, where civilians have been attacked by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army, which also continues to battle rebels in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. With no end in sight, and against the backdrop of the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, the war in Yemen has entered its fifth year. Fierce fighting has resumed several months after a fragile UN-backed ceasefire deal in December between Houthi rebels and the internationally recognized government of Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Civilians have suffered airstrikes and shelling from all sides of the conflict, but the Saudi-led coalition – supporting Hadi and itself backed by the US, UK, and France – has been responsible for a disproportionate number of civilian 5