Upcoming Events

Cieng, Kafka, and Malcolm X: how southern Sudanese displaced people in Khartoum worked out what liberation might mean

Lunch Seminar

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 12:00-14:00 - PRIO, Hausmanns gate 3, Oslo

​A PRIO Centre on Culture and Violent Conflict seminar with Nicki Kindersley, Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow, Cambridge University, and comments from Øystein H. Rolandsen, PRIO, and Iselin Frydenlund, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society.

Dr. Nicki Kindersley has for over a decade collected and researched wartime cultural expressions from Sudan and South Sudan. She is currently working on a book on the impoverished southern Sudanese displaced people living on the edge of Khartoum during the second civil war (1983-2005). Based on many conversations and translations of surviving written and recorded works, Dr. Kindersley will tell a story of cultural production among this internal diaspora.

The Science and Politics of Death Tolls: Hunger, Disasters, and War

PRIO Annual Peace Address with Debarati Guha-Sapir​

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:30-19:30 - PRIO, Hausmanns gate 3, Oslo

The 2018 PRIO Annual Peace Address will be given by Debarati Guha-Sapir. 

She is the Director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and a Professor at University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels, Belgium.

The purposes of crises death tolls today are many and extremely diverse. They can be used to draw attention to neglected humanitarian crises (Yemen), to prosecute war crimes (Darfur), and to boost resilience and response planning (for instance in the case of violent deaths or death due undernutrition and disease). Now, political accountability has also joined this list, for civil conflicts as well as for natural disasters.

Trump in the Middle East: Negotiating Without Palestinians

Lunch Seminar

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 11:30-13:00 - PRIO, Hausmanns gate 3, Oslo

During Christmas 2017 President Trump upended US policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capitol and declaring that he would move the US embassy to Jerusalem. In a predictable response the Palestinian leadership broke ties with the Trump administration. Since then Trump has defunded UNRWA and closed down the PLO mission in Washington, thus completely severing ties. Despite this, the Trump team has continued to work on the "ultimate deal". These political development raises a series of important questions:

What can such an "ultimate deal" be if Jerusalem is "off the table", the Palestinian refugee demands are considered illegitimate and Palestinians are not a party to the negotiations? Is this the death of the two-state solution? Is this a reversion to the US policy of the 1970s and 80s, where the Palestinians were considered part of the problem, but not part of the solution? What are the Palestinian reactions to these changes in US policy?

Senior Researcher (PRIO) Jørgen Jensehaugen will offer reflections on current US policy in light of past US engagements with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Research Professor Jacob Høigilt (IKOS/PRIO) will reflect on what recent US policy has meant for Palestinians, particularly those residing in Jerusalem.      

The panel will be moderated by Professor Hilde Henriksen Waage (IAKH/PRIO).

A light lunch will be served.

Workshop on Humanitarianism and Political Space

Liquid sovereignty, (de)colonized knowledge and the reshaping of humanitarianism

Tue, 18 December 2018 - PRIO, Hausmanns gate 3, Oslo

Todd Huffman

Photo: Todd Huffman

​Political space is embedded in systems of truth claims that are asserted through normalizing language and culture. Academic debate on the reconfiguration of political space and citizenship, or Post-Westphalian transformation, has produced the term 'liquid sovereignty', which describes changes in political spatiality towards a greater plurality in form and more fluidity in boundaries. Examples of such changes are transformations in the conditions of membership in political associations; reconfiguration of the ethics of care and the prospect of humanitarianism; shifts to mobility and networks of transversal relations; pluralisation of sovereignty beyond and beneath the state; erosion of territorial control; competition between contending 'projects of belonging' in rapidly evolving political spaces; privatization of a growing array of public functions and services; the move away from Western-centric models of power; the increasing significance of virtual social and political spatiality; blurring of boundaries between war and peace through new technologies and modes of conflict; and the globalisation of civil society action and resistance.