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.