Overview

THIS PAGE CONTAINS HISTORICAL INFORMATION AND IS PRESERVED HERE AS A MATTER OF RECORD.

The UVC has partnered with the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a host of other partners on this UK Department for International Development (DFID) funded research consortium. The Conflict Research Programme (CRP) will fill a gap of understanding on the increasing complex dynamics characterizing contemporary armed conflicts and the ways in which high level political contests translate into violent contestation at local levels.

With an initial focus on Iraq, Syria, DRC, Somalia, and South Sudan, the CRP measures to tackle the drivers and dynamics of armed conflict through research on the following central questions:

(a) Political Marketplace: How does the political marketplace function and interact with systems of governance and moral populism to drive violence?

(b) ‘What works’: How do structural interventions and ‘bottom-up’ local efforts to maintain values of civicness such as justice, civility, inclusion, and dialogue challenge and resist systems of power and exclusionary identity politics and complement ‘top-down’ interventions to create an institutionalized public authority that commands legitimacy?

(c) Post-conflict state-building rarely works, and it is not for lack of effort; contemporary violent conflicts have a number of key characteristics that frustrate and subvert international engagement: How can interventions enhance local and international efforts at reducing violence, minimizing human suffering, and improving governance?

UVC Director Tatiana Carayannis will co-direct the consortium’s work on the Democratic Republic of Congo with Ghent University’s Koen Vlassenroot, and lead on the CRP’s thematic focus on security sectors interventions with the World Peace Foundation’s Mulugeta Gebrehiwot. The CRP is led by Consortium Executive Director, Professor Mary Kaldor and Co-Director for Research, Professor Alex de WaalProfessor Toby Dodge leads the work on Iraq and the wider region, and Dr. Rim Turkmani is the research director for Syria.

The UVC will also manage the Conflict Research Fellowship and the CRP Small Grants Programme.

For more information, please see the CRP website.

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