The 7th Conflict & Change PhD Workshop once again attracted an international pool of PhD researchers to the UCL campus in London. Studying conflict in tumultuous times, participants presented a great variety of projects on important questions in the study of conflict, peace, and political change. This year’s edition of the workshop, taking place from 24-25 February in the heart of London, included 28 participants from 16 different institutions in the UK, continental Europe and beyond including Lund University, Pennsylvania State University, University College London, University of Hamburg, University of Oslo, ETH Zurich, Standford University, University of Oxford, Bocconi University, Durham University, and the University of Cambridge among others. We are grateful for the continued interest in the workshop and the great opportunity to bring early career researchers and their varied projects, ideas, and methodological approaches to UCL and the Conflict in Change cluster. Besides many first-time attendees, some attendees have come back a second time this year, joined as members in the audience, or even took on new roles as discussants after finishing their PhDs. It is great to expand the interaction and mutual exchange across several generations of PhD researchers and beyond.
Professor Nils Metternich welcomed participants on behalf of the Conflict & Change research cluster, providing opening remarks early Monday morning. Following the opening remarks, four projects kicked off the workshop on a panel titled Repression, Constituencies and Legacies of Violence. The contributions included a project on the conditional impact of repression on patterns of cooperation that focused on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The second project made interventions in the literature on the compliance with armed actors, proposing a more covert compliance approach. The third paper discussed the importance of memory of violence for post-conflict societies. The fourth paper engaged in a meticulous study of the impact of war casualties on the support for leftwing policies after the war. Professor Neil Ketchley and Dr. Marina Duque provided insightful comments.
The second panel titled Civilian Agency in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies featured papers that investigated myriad aspects of rebel governance. The first paper introduced a new concept and measure of collaborative rebel governance and its impact on the onset of negotiations. The second presentation suggested a bottom-up approach to the conceptualization of rebel governance, rooted in fieldwork. The third project looked at the impact of controlling digital communication on the effectiveness of armed actors’ governance in Brazil. The final presentation looked at role of local civil society actors in post-conflict Colombia, suggesting an important role for these actors in preventing the outbreak of further conflict. Dr. Tessa Deveraux and Dr. Carl Müller-Crepon closely engaged with the projects as discussants and offered helpful feedback for the next steps.
Following the lunch break, the third panel of the day concerned itself with Conflict Resolution and Post-War Development. The four papers offered a great variety of topics under the umbrella of the panel theme. The first paper studied the role of local security provision and its role in incentivizing displaced people to return. The second presenter introduced a sophisticated theoretical framework for a more comprehensive measurement of legitimacy that is important to build sustainable peace locally. The third paper looked at the impact of peacekeeping missions and what their exit means for post-conflict societies, introducing a new dataset that maps different peacekeeping missions and their characteristics. The final paper proposed an ambitious project that studies the contingencies of colonialism for new states in the global economy. Professor Phillip Ayoub and Dr. Adam Harris prepared comments for all of the papers.
The final panel of the first day under the title Victimization, Justice and Human Rights in Conflicts comprised four papers that covered a variety of topics in the study of civilian victimization. The first presenter on the panel introduced the importance of forced motherhood as a form of sexualized violence in conflicts. The second project took on the discussion of victimhood that the other papers likewise measured and discussed theoretically. The project made use of discourse analysis to explore victimhood and the question who gets to be a victim. The third paper introduced a new dataset on civilian victimization and its connection to calls for criminal justice during conflict, suggesting a negative connection between the two that is offset in natural resource locations. The panel was concluded by a computational analysis of the impact of violence against peacekeepers on post-conflict outcomes. Dr. Rod Abouharb engaged with the papers as a discussant.
In the evening of the first day, Professor Neil Ketchley provided this year’s keynote under the title Unresolved Questions in the Study of Contentious Politics. The engaging and thought-provoking talk was greatly appreciated by participants, faculty members from the Conflict & Change cluster and students in the Security Studies Master’s programme at UCL. We are grateful for Neil’s contribution to the workshop both as a keynote speaker and discussant. The talk certainly provided much food for thought and was a great fit for the many questions that participants’ projects are grappling with! We ended the first day with a reception for all participants and members of the Conflict & Change cluster!
The second day started with a panel on the Sources and Processes of Violent Conflict. The first paper looked at the impact of natural disasters on violence during civil war. The second presenter proposed an argument for a better evaluation of the collapse of the Afghan government and the rise of the Taliban regime after the withdrawal of international troops, focusing on the common ethnicity of both the Taliban and the government forces. The third paper looked at the importance of social work, especially carried out by women, for the capacity and survival of armed groups. The final paper was deeply grounded in experiences and findings collected during year-long fieldwork in Niger. Here, the presence of international armed forces was linked to an increase in terrorist attacks, driven by a declining acceptance of the presence of the international troops. Dr. Manuel Vogt and Dr. Daniel Schulte closely engaged with the projects and provided comments as discussants.
The penultimate panel of the workshop looked at the The Role of Social Media, Education and War Legacies on Authoritarianism. Two out of the four papers looked at contemporary political developments in Ukraine and Russia following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The first paper, basing its insights on surveys, studied the role of Telegram and the characteristics of people using it in Ukraine. The subsequent paper provided a new analysis with rich new data on estimated Russian casualties suffered during the war in Ukraine. This paper estimated the effect of the casualties on the support for autocrats. A new computational analysis of social media platforms and their connection to extremist violence was the core of the third paper. The final paper of the panel introduced a new project on the drivers of the expansion of higher education globally in the 1950s, making a new argument on the link between this expansion and great power rivalries during the Cold War. Dr. Elodie Dourain and Professor Kristin Bakke took the time to share their insights and comments as discussants.
The final panel of the workshop discussed different challenges to democracy. The panel titled Protests, Narratives and Challenges to Democracy brought together projects that looked at the curtailing of the rights to protest, the drivers behind anti-disinformation laws, and the composition of protest groups in Guatemala. The first two papers proposed survey experiments to study the attitudes towards a limit of the right to protest in Norway as well as the impact of the proximity to protests on the attitude towards them in Latin America. The third paper introduced a new dataset that collects data on disinformation laws, linking its occurrence to elections and certain regime types. The final presentation of the workshop shared a project on protests and the composition of urban and peripheral protesting groups in Guatemala. Professor Neil Mitchell and Dr. Johanna Amaya-Panche acted as discussants.
We are grateful to all participants for coming to UCL! We furthermore thank the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at UCL, the Security Studies programme at UCL, as well as the European Institute at UCL for generous financial support!
This year’s edition of the workshop was organized by Giovanni Hollenweger, Kaiser Kang, Michael Jacobs, and Finn Klebe.