The 6th Conflict & Change PhD Workshop was a great success! 27 students presented their regionally, methodologically, and thematically varied PhD projects at UCL on 11-12 March 2024. Participants came from more than 15 different institutions across London, the UK, Europe, and beyond. The institutions included the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cornell University, Peace Research Institute Oslo, Uppsala University, University of Amsterdam, Hertie School of Governance, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, University of Oxford, University of Kent, University of Cambridge, University College London, among others. We are delighted to see the great interest in the workshop and how much it has established itself as a point for exchange and community building for early career researchers working on conflict and societal change in different disciplines of the social sciences and beyond. This year also marked the first time that former attendees joined the workshop audience as ‘alumni’. In addition to that, many of the participants were first-time attendees, broadening the outreach of the Conflict & Change cluster and the workshop in particular.
The first workshop day was kicked off through an insightful keynote by this year’s keynote speaker Anastasia Shesterinina. Professor Shesterinina, director of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York, shared her personal research trajectory with the audience during her talk on ‘Grappling with human experience in civil war studies: A research trajectory’. Shesterinina reflected on research designs before and during fieldwork, the researcher’s positionality, and ethical considerations throughout the research process. She also underscored the importance of community building and exchange for early career researchers, in particular. We are grateful for her contribution – also as a discussant later on.
The workshop continued with the first panel titled Identity, Locality, and Strategy in Mobilisation. The panel featured presentations on the relationships between groups in contentious movements under repression, the link between online and offline mobilisation in an age of social media and the (growing) importance of large urban centres for diffusion of protest, as well as the paths from riots to escalation and organized violence. Professor Anastasia Shesterinina and Dr. Manuel Vogt engaged with the projects as discussants and provided insightful feedback and suggestions for the next steps.
After the lunch break, the second panel on Rents and Cultural Roots as Tools of Mobilization shed light on additional drivers of institutional and extra-institutional mobilisation. The presentations comprised the investigation of rent distribution and electoral violence in Nigeria, a re-conceptualisation of religious parties, economic drivers behind side-taking during Libya’s wave of mobilisation in 2011, and varying forms of mobilisation of tribes in Iraq. The panellists benefitted greatly from the expertise that Dr. Adam Harris and Professor Phillip Ayoub shared with them as discussants on the panel.
To Control or To Be Controlled? Agency and Its Limits in a (Post)-Conflict Society was the title of the third panel that explored different aspects of rebel governance and return decisions of displaced people. The four papers looked at the role of civilians in rebel governance institutions and the impact this has on conflict, the instrumentalising of marriage rules as an expression of social control, the role of ideology in restraining sexual violence perpetrated by combatants, and the provision of security and its impact on the return of displaced people in South Sudan. Dr. Carl Müller-Crepon, visiting us from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as Dr. Johanna Amaya-Panche engaged closely with the projects as discussants.
The last panel of the first day looked at Authoritarianism, Repression and Resistance. Dr. Janina Beiser-McGrath and Professor Zeynep Bulutgil took the time to discuss the projects. The panellists discussed Franco’s authoritarian legacies for Spaniards’ tolerance of the police, the role of civil resistance in increasingly autocratic societies, fake news labels as a form of digital repression, and the impact of inter-ethic ties on the status of political groups in political institutions.
The second day started with a panel on Drivers, Characteristics, and Consequences of Protest and Unrest. Here, three of the panellists shared their ideas and results from surveys and survey experiments that concerned themselves with the effects and drivers of protest and its tactics. The projects looked at the impact of protests on polarization of supporters and opponents of the protesters, the impact of tactics on the approval of protest, and the meaning of international protest for protesting individuals. The fourth presentation, relatedly, looked at the impact of refugees on unrest within the host society. Professor Kristin Bakke and Dr. Luis Schenoni shared their insights and commented on the papers.
The sixth panel of the workshop was titled Building an Inclusive Society? Approaches to Displacement, Education, and Multi-Ethnicity and featured projects that looked at the implications of mass expansion of higher education, the potential effects of daughters and female siblings on the tolerance of gender norms in Africa, the potential of decentralisation policies for conflict mitigation in multi-ethnic states, and the unequal treatment of displaced people and refugees in contexts of humanitarian response. Dr. Marina Duque and Dr. Rod Abouharb served as discussants on the panel.
The last panel of the workshop offered projects that proposed new methodological innovations to tackle long-standing questions. The panel titled Spatial and Territorial Dimensions of Conflict featured presentations that looked at the role of borders for the duration of conflict, the changing elite identities in Alsace-Lorraine, the impact on natural disasters on territorial control, and the collection of new data on climate-related conflict through innovative NLP methods. Professor Nils Metternich and Professor Neil Mitchell offered their reflections on the projects as discussants.
Overall, the workshop was a great success. The participants were highly engaged throughout both days, making for high-quality panels and lots of opportunities for intellectual and personal exchange. We are grateful for the continuing generous support through the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy without which this event would not be possible. We also thank the Institute of Advanced Studies for providing their space to host our workshop. This year’s workshop was organized by Yilin Su, Michael Jacobs, Giovanni Hollenweger, and Finn Klebe who are all part of the Conflict & Change research cluster and PhD Candidates in the Department of Political Science.