At the 2018 conference of the Internaitonal Studies Association, Hannah Smidt, a former Conflict & Change colleague who now works at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), received the International Studies Association’s Dina Zinnes Award for the best graduate student paper presented at the annual meeting 2017. In the paper, Hannah explores how the presence and activities of UN peacekeepers affect violence around elections in war-torn countries.