“Our project was attempting to understand how people are responding and with what consequences, right? I mean, if people starve, that’s really bad, obviously … but if you’re the US government and thinking in totally narrow self-interested terms, it’s also bad if people join radical groups because they are desperate, or migrate en masse to other areas and put pressure on refugee camps and borders or governments,” said Leonardo Villalón, the lead investigator of the project and founder of the University of Florida’s Sahel Research Group.
