On Thursday 31 March, Kristian Skrede Gleditch of the University of Essex and PRIO gave his Presidential Address at the 2022 annual convention of the International Studies Associations (ISA) in Nashville, USA. In his talk, Kristian focused on the policy relevance of doing prediction in scientific research to improve transparency, evaluate theoretical models, highlight plausible implications of alternative future scenarios, and identify key sources of vulnerability. This marks the end of his one-year term as President of the ISA. Kristian is the second ISA President from PRIO, the first being Nils Petter Gleditsch in 2008-09.
https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Governance/President
Friday, we got to know that a large project has been funded by the Research Council of Norway's INFRASTRUKTUR initiative, that aims to build up relevant, up-to-date infrastructure that is accessible to the research community, to various private and public sector user groups, and to the general public.
PRIO has long been at the forefront of research on protest movements.
As of 2020 PRIO houses three major projects that simultaneously are investigating mass mobilizations and protests. As a result, we will have a large team of leading experts in the field. This is something that no other research institution can boast of, either nationally or internationally.
Read more about this in Tora Sagård's summing up of these projects and the links between them.
Mauricio Rivera has received FINNUT funding from the Research Council of Norway for the 4-year project The Crime-Reducing Effect of Education: Disaggregating Education and Impact on Violent Crime (CREED). Congratulations to Mauricio and his project team, which includes Kendra Dupuy (PRIO), Kristian Hoelscher (PRIO), Gudrun Østby (PRIO), Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (Essex & PRIO), Barbara Zarate-Tenorio (Essex & Institute for Social Research), as well as Ernesto Cardenas (Universidad Javeriana).
The Research Council of Norway announced this morning that PRIO will receive TOPPFORSK funding for the project: "Securing the victory? Understanding dynamics of short-run and long-term success in popular uprisings and democratization".
The University of Essex has today announced that Kristian Skrede Gleditsch has been appointed to the prestigious Regius Professorship. The honour of holding a Regius Professorship was conferred on the University of Essex by Her Majesty The Queen of England in 2013 to mark her Diamond Jubilee.
Marianne Dahl successfully defended her doctoral thesis today, 30 March, at the Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences - NTNU. The title of her thesis is "Pockets of Opportunity: State Dissident Interactions and Regime Change".
Her trial lecture: "What role does social mobilisation play for regime stability and transition, particularly considering the broader social mobilisation literature?"
Members of the evaluation committee included Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (University of Essex & PRIO) and Livia Schubiger (LSE). Thesis advisers were Paul Mitchell (LSE) and Gudrun Østby (PRIO).
Since World War II, civil wars have replaced interstate wars as the most frequent and deadly form of armed conflict globally. A new book, What Do We Know about Civil Wars? is edited by T. David Mason & Sarah McLaughlin Mitchell, and has several contributions from present and former PRIO researchers, all connected to PRIO's Centre for the Study of Civil War (2002-2012).
Gleditsch becomes the first Norwegian to receive the Anne-Lise Meier Forschungspreis from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation.
The American Political Science Association (APSA) award for best book in conflict processes published during 2012-13 has been given to Ethnicity, Grievances, and Civil War(Cambridge University Press, 2013), coauthored by Lars-Erik Cederman (PRIO Global Fellow; ETH Zurich), Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (University of Essex and PRIO) and Halvard Buhaug (PRIO and NTNU). This is the third award given to this book in a matter of months, the other being the Conflict Research Society’s Book of the Year 2014 and the Network of European Peace Scientists’ NEPS Medal 2014. Congratulations!
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is one out of 9 scientists with affiliation to Norwegian institutions who is included in the new list compiled by Thomson Reuters, and is also the only UK-based political scientist to be included in this prestigious international list of the most highly cited researchers in recent years. Kristian has his main position as Professor at the Department of Government at the University of Essex, and holds a 20 % position at PRIO.
The book Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War, written by Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Halvard Buhaug, has been awarded the Conflict Research Society's Book of the Year Award 2014. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 as a part of the Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series, and argues that political and economic inequalities generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war.
In the article ‘How to stop the fighting, sometimes', the Economist presents a nuanced history of how civil wars are initiated, sustained and brought to an end.
At the recent convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco 3–6 April, Håvard Hegre was elected Chair of the SSIP (Scientific Study of International Processes) section of the ISA. Every year, this section sponsors a number of sessions where PRIOites present papers. To our knowledge, it’s the first time this section has a chair from outside North America.
The Department of Government at the University of Essex invites applications for a three-year, full-time research position as a PhD fellow.
This PhD fellowship is financed as part of a Grant from the European Research Council for a project on “Conflict, Strategies, and Violence: An Actor-based Approach to Violent and Non-Violent Interactions” led by Professor Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.
Deadline: 1 June 2013
A new edited volume on civil war and fragile states has just been published by Edward Elgar. The book contains no less than four PRIO articles:
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch of the University of Essex and PRIO has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for the project ‘Conflict, Strategies, and Violence: An Actor-based Approach to Violent and Non-Violent Interactions’.
While existing research tends to equate conflict with violence, this project examines conflict in terms of incompatibilities between actors, where the structure of the incompatibilities and the actors’ strategies and interactions determine whether we see escalation to violence or alternative outcomes, such as accommodation or regime change. The project will be hosted by the Department of Government at the University of Essex, but a significant component of the work will be conducted at PRIO, where Håvard Strand will play an important role in the project. The new project will also draw on the PRIO project on Effective Non-Violence? Resistance Strategies and Political Outcomes, funded by the Research Council of Norway for the period 2012–15.
The ERC project started on 1 February and will run for five years. The proposal summary follows below:
An academic course on strategic nonviolent resistance, organized by International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) in collaboration with PRIO.
Time: 12 – 14 May, 2013.
Venue: Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Hausmanns gate 7, 0186 Oslo.
Deadline of applications: 01 March 2013.
The International Studies Association has just announced the outcome of its elections. Amitav Acharya is the new President-Elect. New Vice Presidents-Elect are Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Carolyn Shaw, and Cameron Thies. They take office from the next ISA conference, which is held in San Francisco, 3–6 April 2013. Henrik Urdal is also a member of the ISA’s Governing Council for the period 2012–14, elected last year.
David Cunningham, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Idean Salehyan have been awarded the Outstanding Article of the year award for 2009 by the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). The ceremony took place at the IACM annual meeting in Istanbul.
The August issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution is a special issue dedicated to output from the Disaggregating Civil War project. This project (GROW) is a collaboration between CSCW (PRIO), University of Essex and ETH Zürich. This special issue is edited by Lars-Erik Cederman and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.
The International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) invites applications for a three-year, full-time research position as PhD fellow. The position provides the opportunity to work in a leading international research institution with high academic standards and a cross-disciplinary environment.
CSCW researcher Kristian Skrede Gleditsch has published an article in the October issue of International Organization, together with Michael D. Ward. The title of the article is 'Diffusion and the International Context of Democratization'.
Publisher information here.