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PhD Workshop 2021
After the success of the past two years, members of the Conflict & Change research cluster are organizing the third edition of the PhD workshop at the Department of Political Science, University College London.
Sam Erkiletian, Jennifer Hodge and Kit Rickard are all PhD researchers working on armed conflict and political violence, broadly defined, and will soon issue a call for abstracts for the 2021 edition.
On June 26, 2020, Dr Andreas Juon successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, titled 'Grievances, identity, and political opportunity: The effects of corporate and liberal power-sharing on ethnic conflict'. In this dissertation, he argues that ethnically-based ('corporate') power-sharing institutions may have divergent effects on various group types and across different time horizons. While pacifying included groups in the short-term, they may conversely lead to violent backlashes by those groups that remain excluded or whose former dominance is now visibly circumscribed. In contrast, these side-effects should be less pronounced in formally group-blind, liberal power-sharing systems.
He tests these expectations quantitatively in a global sample using the Constitutional Power-Sharing Dataset, which he collected as part of his Ph.D. In these analyses, he systematically considers the effects of power-sharing institutions both on the eventual eruption of violence and on underlying mass attitudes, including grievances and ethnic salience. Andreas has now started a 2-year Postdoc at ETH Zurich, where he is working on a new project that investigates majority backlashes against minority rights and power-sharing.
Andreas Juon presenting at the C&C PhD Workshop, 2020.
C&C member Dr Rod Abouharb and his co-author Dr Benjamin Fordham, recently published their work in Social Sciences. The article, titled “Trade and Strike Activity in the Postwar United States”, examines the effect of international trade on strike activity within the United States since World War II. They find that globalization influences strike activity through its effects on the bargaining position , while import competition may also indirectly reduce strike activity by decreasing union density.
More generally, Rod’s work examines processes that affect the civility of relations between government and its citizens. In particular, he is interested in how economic integration into the international economic system affects the onset of civil war and human rights abuses within countries. Read more about his work here.
On September 27, 2020, the long-standing conflict over the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh reignited, quickly escalating to all-out war with significant civilian casualties. Drawing on unique public opinion survey data from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh in February 2020, Conflict & Change’s Prof. Kristin M. Bakke—with her collaborators Prof. John O’Loughlin at the University of Colorado and Prof. Gerard Toal at Virginia Tech—reports on the issues at the heart of this conflict, and what the people living in this contested territory want, in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage (October 2) and in The Conversation (October 12).
C&C member, Professor Neil Mitchell, has been awarded the State Repression.com “Scholar of Attention” award. State Repression.com—which aims to provide information, thoughts, and data on for coercive government behaviour from domestic spying to genocide—selects scholars whose work is path-breaking and/or historically solid. According to them:
Mitchell's work has advanced the study of state repression in diverse ways. In one important work, he got us to focus on the connections or lack thereof between those that plan repressive policies and those who implement them, noting how the connection/disconnection provokes violent activity. In another work, he identifies how democratic leaders can avoid being held accountable for the activities that most believe they should be held accountable for. Ever provocative.
To read more on Neil’s incredible work, visit the UCL website here.
