Congratulations to Betel... Dr. Betel B. Birhanu!

Betel B. Birhanu defended her Ph.D and received Summa Cum Laude. Betel was a visiting PhD student at the Department for Political Science at UCL from the University of Zurich in early 2018. During this time, not only was she an active member of the Conflict & Change Group, but the group had the pleasure of reading and discussing her work.

Her PhD research challenged the almost taken-for-granted convention in the human rights scholarship that transnational human rights pressure predictably simulates a positive change in state behaviour, particularly when applied to seemingly vulnerable target states. By using the insights drawn from a case study on Ethiopia - a vulnerable target state where transnational human rights pressure should have induced a positive human rights change but rather resulted in an authoritarian entrenchment - it shows how and why this may also be the case in Kenya.

She tells us that the inputs received from the presentation at the Conflict & Change group were really helpful.

Well done, Betel!

Manuel Vogt teaches short course on Comparative Politics at UNAH, Honduras

Manuel Vogt, Assistant Professor in UCL’s Department of Political Science, taught a short course on social science methodology at the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Honduras (National Autonomous University of Honduras). The 2-day course introduced participants to the theory and practice of comparativist political science and aimed at furthering the methodological skills of postgraduate students as well as professors in Honduras’ main public university.

Manuel Vogt speaks at Guatemala's Foreign Ministry

On 31 July, 2018, Manuel Vogt, Assistant Professor in UCL’s Department of Political Science, held a talk at the Diplomatic Academy of Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry. Using the mechanisms of power sharing in Switzerland as a concrete example, Manuel’s presentation on “Ethnic Power Relations and Conflict in Multiethnic States” introduced the theory and practice of conflict management to a select group of career diplomats and other Foreign Ministry staff.


Workshop on Conflict and Governance: Working with Informal Institutions during and after War

On June 5, 2018, UCL’s Global Governance Institute (GGI) and Conflict & Change members Kristin M. Bakke and Kit Rickard organized a workshop on “Conflict and Governance: Working with Informal Institutions during and after War.”


Central to the international community’s responses to conflict-ridden states are interventions and recommendations aimed at bolstering state capacity, improving public goods provision, and fostering inclusive institutions. Yet external states and international organizations’ “institutional engineering” does not happen in a governance vacuum. Wars and state fragility often do not destroy pre-existing informal institutions and authority structures. In fact, they frequently give rise to new ones that govern people’s lives and are considered legitimate by the local population. A policy concern for external states and international organizations is how to navigate between cooperating with formal or informal authorities.  The workshop to brought together more than 25 scholars and practitioners to explore the politics of cooperation in areas of disputed control. The workshop addressed questions such as, what are ‘informal institutions’, ‘informal sources of authority’, ‘rebel governance’, and ‘wartime institutions’? How do these institutions develop? (How) do they gain legitimacy? What is their relationship to the formal institutions of the state? What are the costs of either including or excluding informal sources of authority from negotiation processes? How do external actors engage with informal sources of authority and de facto states in prolonged conflicts? What is the legacy of wartime institutions in the post-war period? And how do reforms of the formal institutions of the state shape the endurance and legitimacy of informal sources of authority?