7th Conflict & Change PhD Workshop 2025 – Studying Peace and Conflict in Tumultuous Times

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.

Luis Schenoni Publishes New Book

C&C member Luis Schenoni, Associate Professor and the Director of the Security Studies Programme in the Department of Political Science at UCL, has published his first monograph, Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge University Press). In this new book, he provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book examines how the outcome of wars in the distant past have shaped the modern Latin American states of today. His new book is also on Amazon. You can also find a podcast episode and a blog post on the book.

New Publication in ISQ

This paper by Luis L. Schenoni and co-authors delves into the intriguing historical phenomenon of how states in the Americas have managed to mitigate the escalation of their disputes into full-blown wars, instead keeping conflicts confined to lower levels of severity over the past century. By tracing the trajectory of interstate conflict severity in the region, the study proposes a compelling correlation with the establishment of key norms, particularly the principles of territorial integrity and non-intervention. Central to this analysis is the visionary perspective of Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the recipient of the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize, whose pivotal role in ending the Chaco War underscores the significance of these norms in maintaining peace. According to the paper, since a region-wide agreement on these norms in the juncture of the 1933 Montevideo Conference, peace has crystalized in the Americas, setting an example for the rest of the world.

Decades of political science research have established that territorial disputes and disputes over the legitimacy of governments are some of the major causes of interstate war. If we look at the world today, international conflict continues to be driven fundamentally by intervention and territorial conquest. The War in Ukraine is a clear example. Yet, how were states in the Western Hemisphere able to forbit that type of violence? The Americas were once plagued by interstate warfare, yet in the 1930s underwent a remarkable transformation characterized by the dwindling frequency, duration, and severity of such conflicts. This paper seeks to unravel the enigma behind this shift, focusing on the emergence and consolidation of a unique norm-complex within the region—comprising territorial integrity, non-intervention, and peaceful conflict resolution—which served as a bulwark against the scourge of interstate war. 

Drawing on insights from Latin American entrepreneurship post-independence and the ideals of Pan-Americanism, this study elucidates the gradual crystallization of the norm-complex. The signing of the Saavedra Lamas Treaty in the early 1930s stands as a watershed moment, marking the formal codification of these principles. Through meticulous analysis, the paper elucidates the process by which norm complexes develop, thrive, and ultimately shape the trajectory of interstate relations.  Employing a multifaceted approach encompassing statistical analysis and within-case counterfactuals, the paper delves into the evolution and far-reaching effects of the Latin American norm-complex. By charting the decline of interstate conflict severity alongside the acceptance and institutionalization of these norms, the study offers compelling evidence of their efficacy in fostering regional stability and peace. 

New Publication in International Security

Latin America, which is the most violent region in the world in terms of homicide rates, has increasingly militarized its approach to fighting crime. Is this strategy efficient? Is it sustainable? And what are the costs? In a recent article with International Security, C&C member and UCL faculty Luis L. Schenoni joins forces with the Harold C. and Alice T. Nowlin Regents Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, Raul L. Madrid, to  analyze how South America went from the most politically violent region in the world in the nineteenth century to a stable one by the turn of the twentieth century.

The data for the analysis comes from the Latin American Revolts Project (LARP), funded in the UK by the British Academy and the UCL Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. The project identifies revolts in Latin America since 1830 and manually codes them based on primary and secondary historical sources. Prior to its UCL-phase, LARP had identified 1,500 revolts—making it the most complete dataset on political violence in the region for the period 1830-1930—and gathered data on various aspects of these revolts, including their objectives, duration, rebel group size, casualties, and rebel aims. The International Security article focused on the data for South America from 1830 to 1930.

Since Dr. Schenoni’s arrival to UCL, LARP has expanded beyond 1930 and to other regions such as Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.  LARP now counts two other principal investigators, Paola Galano Toro from ETH Zurich and Guillermo Kreiman from Universidad Carlos III, who met Dr. Schenoni at UCL as a presenter at our annual C&C PhD Workshop and as a visiting doctoral researcher, respectively. Since 2021 they have coordinated large teams of students from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina (where Dr. Schenoni is an Affiliated Professor) to contribute to the expansion of what is expected to become the dataset on political violence in Latin America with the largest historical coverage. The dataset is also expected to become a tour de force in our conceptualization of political violence by introducing and operationalising the novel concept of revolt.

The preliminary analysis of the dataset presented in the International Studies article focuses on South America from 1830 to 1930 and underscores the crucial role of bolstering military and security forces in deterring domestic political violence. Historical data demonstrates that the expansion and professionalization of the military during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries significantly decreased revolts by non-state actors. This decline in revolts correlates strongly with indicators of military strength and professionalization, suggesting that a capable military acts as a deterrent to rebellion. Increases in military strength, such as troop numbers or the establishment of military academies, are associated with a notable decrease in the likelihood of revolts.

However, the sustainability and rationale of militarization strategies are called into question nowadays. While nineteenth-century South American states could afford to invest heavily in their armed forces due to economic growth and international tensions, such conditions are absent today. Maintaining dramatic increases in armed forces may prove challenging without sustained economic growth and external threats. Additionally, contemporary violence in the region is predominantly criminal rather than political, posing different challenges for militaries ill-suited to combating dispersed criminal gangs. Furthermore, current militarization trends risk undermining democracy, as politicized militaries may infringe upon civil rights and contribute to democratic backsliding.  While militarization played a role in transitioning from chaos to order in the nineteenth century, contemporary dynamics necessitate caution in evaluating militaristic strategies. If pursued, prioritizing the professionalization of security forces and ensuring military neutrality in political matters are paramount.

Ultimately, understanding the nineteenth century in Latin America sheds light on the sustainability and risks associated with current militarization trends, advocating for a nuanced approach that carefully considers structural and institutional factors.