PRIO is immensely proud to announce that Senior Researcher Julia Palik has been awarded the highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for the groundbreaking project titled Com2Civ: Rituals in Combatant-to-Civilian Transformation.
This five-year project will seek to uncover how rituals – one of the most common yet understudied aspects of human social life – shape how former combatants from armed groups return to society.
The number of armed conflicts continues to rise globally. Many of these conflicts are recurring, highlighting the urgent need to understand why reintegration efforts continue to fall short. While previous research has mostly focused on economic and political reintegration, Com2Civ turns the spotlight to rituals – exploring how they can both facilitate and hinder the transition from combatant to civilian life.
"Com2Civ takes a truly multidisciplinary approach. We will bring together insights from political science, social psychology, anthropology and gender studies to better understand one of the most pressing challenges after war: how former combatants return to civilian life," said the grantee, Senior Researcher Julia Palik.
“By uncovering the social-psychological mechanisms that shape this transformation, we will be able to generate new knowledge that can inform reintegration policies and contribute to lasting peace.”
Palik will lead the project alongside a dedicated team of two postdoctoral researchers and three research assistants. Together, they will implement a participatory research design involving ex-combatants from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) in Colombia. The project will use a novel combination of life-history interviews, surveys and the social cartography method.
Palik added: "Receiving an ERC grant is a great privilege and responsibility. I am deeply motivated to work with my team to generate new knowledge on how such fundamental human activities as rituals shape trust and belonging between ex-combatants and community members. For me, it is both intellectually exciting and profoundly meaningful to use science in the service of more peaceful relations after war.”
“We are incredibly proud to be among the top recipients of ERC grants in Norway. Securing this new grant affirms PRIO’s commitment to cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges of our time,” said Nina Græger, Director of PRIO.
The Com2Civ project joins five other active ERC-funded projects at PRIO and three projects with PRIO participation.
ANTICIPATE: Anticipating the impact of armed conflict on human development (ERC Advanced Grant, 2022-2027), led by Håvard Hegre . The interdisciplinary team of ANTICIPATE studies how armed conflict impacts various aspects of human development, taking local vulnerabilities into account, and expands the VIEWS early-warning system to also alert to the humanitarian impact of war.
AWAR: Adapted to War (ERC Starting Grant, 2021-2026), led by Henrikas Bartusevičius. Have humans evolved psychological adaptations to war? AWAR posits that only evidence of special design can answer this, and presents an elaborate experimental programme of psychological lab experiments and surveys in 40 countries.
FUMI: Future Migration as Present Fact (ERC Consolidator Grant, 2018-2025), led by Jørgen Carling FUMI addresses the research question of how does migration that has not yet taken place shape the lives of individuals and the development of societies. The project is based on multiple forms of data collection among young adults in three West African cities.
MigrationRhythms: Migration rhythms in trajectories of upward social mobility in Asia (ERC Starting Grant, 2021-2026), led by Marta Bivand Erdal . What is driving the tremendous middle-class expansion in Asia and how is it related to the unprecedented levels of migration there? To answer this, the project applies rhythm analysis and uses a mixed-methods research design, including family history interviews and survey data from four Asian cities.
POLIMPACT: Enabling politically sensitive climate change impact assessments for the 21st century (ERC Advanced Grant, 2022-2027), led by Halvard Buhaug . Scenarios used by the IPCC to assess climate change impacts by design assume that there will be no conflict or instability in the future. POLIMPACT develops and uses new political scenarios and to foster more realistic risk assessments.
Peace Dividends: led by Ismene Gizelis (University of Essex). The Peace Dividends and Post-conflict Reconstruction project examines peacekeeping dividends across a broad set of outcomes, evaluating policies that best leverage positive externalities of peacekeeping and if we can discern broader dividends on post-conflict reconstruction, including state-building. PRIO is a partner in the project, involving Research Director Louise Olsson.
EuroWARCHILD: led by Inger Skjelsbæk (University of Oslo). This project aims to study the experiences and needs of three generations of children born of war in Europe: children fathered by enemy soldiers during World War II, children conceived through conflict-related sexual violence during the Bosnian war, and children born of European foreign fighters to ISIS/Daesh. PRIO is a partner in the project, involving Deputy Director Torunn L. Tryggestad.
WoW: The Waging of War: led by Scott Gates (University of Oslo). The project investigates the waging of war, and how internal organization affects the strategies used in warfare. PRIO is a partner in the project, involving Marianne Dahl, Louise Olsson and Siri Aas Rustad
