MOZAMBIQUE

Mozambique's Cabo Delgado insurgency, often described as an ISIS-affiliated conflict, is a masculine crisis disguised as geopolitics. The young men recruited by Ansar al-Sunna are predominantly from marginalized communities that were promised a share of the region's vast natural gas wealth and received nothing. When Total and other multinationals arrived to extract LNG worth hundreds of billions, local men watched foreign workers earn foreign salaries while they continued to fish and farm in poverty. The insurgency offered the dispossessed men what the gas economy denied them: purpose, power, and a framework that validated their rage.

The dual climate-conflict crisis means Mozambican men face compounding trauma with essentially zero psychological support. A man in central Mozambique might rebuild his house after Cyclone Idai, replant his fields, re-establish his livelihood, and then face another cyclone two years later. Each rebuilding depletes not just resources but psychological resilience. The lobolo system means that a man who can't rebuild quickly enough to maintain his family's standard of living faces social humiliation — his in-laws may reclaim his wife if he can't sustain the economic obligations that the bride price implied. Male identity in Mozambique is literally under water, and the floods keep coming.