May
18
to May 19

Conflict and Change PhD Workshop 2026

The year 2025 has ushered in major changes in global politics. As the United States is scaling back from multilateral relationships, raising questions over the stability of the ‘liberal international order’, the European Union tries to increase its unity and rearm itself, while China projects itself as a potentially reliable trade partner for many countries. Against this backdrop of changing geopolitical alignments, armed conflicts have reached a historic high in the post-World War II period, causing unimaginable human suffering – from Gaza to Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine. At the same time (and probably not coincidentally), democracy is on decline. Even ‘solid’ democracies such as the United States have seen rapid democratic decline. In some contexts, the erosion of democratic institutions has been met with popular resistance, as citizens take to the streets to defend democratic norms, but in other contexts, mobilization has coalesced around illiberal and exclusionary projects. Understanding these major developments require analytical approaches that can connect protest, institutional change, violence, and global power dynamics, drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological tools.

The Conflict & Change annual workshop for PhD and doctoral students across the UK and Europe provides a platform for a discussion of these and similar issues, bringing together insights from various disciplines to build an understanding of the issues presented above.

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Feb
24
to Feb 25

Conflict and Change PhD Workshop 2025

The world seems to be in transition. Openly fought armed conflict between nations has returned and become a new normalcy in the news, re-triggering fears of nuclear war that long seemed forgotten. At the same time, hybrid warfare online and through new forms of attacks emerges as a menace that we are only starting to grapple with. Other issues such as climate change, (racial) inequalities, and minority rights that have mobilised millions of people around the world only a few years ago have been pushed to the sidelines even if they are far from resolved and continue to force people to leave their homes. And all this takes place against the backdrop of severe governance crises in many established democracies around the world that struggle to meet the multi-faceted challenges of our times, with citizens that lose trust in democratic norms and regimes that become increasingly authoritarian. How can we make sense of our world in transition and what can peace and conflict studies contribute to a better understanding of these crises?

This PhD workshop, hosted by the Conflict & Change Research Cluster at the Department of Political Science at University College London (UCL) brings together doctoral students working on peace and conflict, contentious politics, human rights, and migration to discuss their research on these complex phenomena.

Each panel includes three to four 10-minute presentations followed by a response by a member of the Conflict & Change Research Cluster at UCL, and an open discussion involving all workshop participants.

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