A major research evaluation undertaken by Uppsala University gives high marks to the research at the Department. The evaluation, known as Quality and Renewal 2011 (KoF11), comprised two different parts. Firstly, a peer-review process, conducted by distinguished scholars of the international research community. Secondly, a bibliometric study of publications in the period 2007–2010.
Read more about the evaluation.
January 26 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Will H. Moore (Professor, Florida State University). "Dissident-State Interactions and Outcomes in the Arab Spring"
February 9 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Richard Ned Lebow (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government, Dartmouth University). “Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations”
February 23 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Steven I. Wilkinson (Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Yale University). “Veterans, Skills and Ethnic Conflict: Evidence from the Partition of India”
March 22 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Christopher Sullivan (PhD candidate, University of Notre Dame). "Organizing Oppression: Political Repression, Power and the Media"
May 3 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Fotini Christia (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). "Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan"
May 24 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Barbara Walter (Professor of Political Science, University of California-San Diego). "Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil War"
May 31 (13.15-15, Sal 2): Leonardo Arriola (Assistant Professor, University of California-Berkeley). "Election Violence in Democratizing States"
Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil War
Barbara Walter
Professor of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California-San Diego
Professor Walter is an expert on international security, with an emphasis on internal wars, bargaining and cooperation, and terrorism/counter-terrorism. Her most recent book is Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is also author of Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton University Press, 2002). Walter is on the board of International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and International Interactions. She is also the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Guggenheim and Smith Richardson Foundations.
Thursday, 24 May 2012
13.15-15.00
Sal. 2, Gamla Torget 3
Open to the public.
Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan
Fotini Christia
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christia received her PhD in Public Policy at Harvard University. Her research interests deal with issues of ethnicity, conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world. Christia has written opinion pieces on her experiences from Afghanistan, Iran, the West Bank and Gaza and Uzbekistan for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Her book manuscript, The Closest of Enemies: Alliance Formation in Civil War, focuses on the role of local elites in civil wars and is under contract at Cambridge University Press. She has done extensive ethnographic, survey and experimental research in the field. Her current Afghanistan research project, which she will discuss at this lecture, is a randomized impact evaluation of a 1 billion dollar community driven development program. The evaluation, which examines questions of local governance and development, spans 500 rural communities, across 10 districts in 6 Afghan provinces and involves approximately 15,000 survey respondents.
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Organizing Oppression: Political Order, Repression and the Media
Christopher M. Sullivan
PhD candidate, University of Notre Dame
How do states enforce political order? Conventional answers to this question focus on government responses to behavioral challenges. However, such efforts shortchange attempts by state authorities to control/eliminate activity prior to the emergence of dissident collective action. After providing a theory of how repression and resistance function prior to the emergence of collective action, this research employs unique data drawn from the confidential records of the Guatemalan National Police to examine the use of pre-emptive repression in Guatemala between 1975 and 1985.
Sullivan, who is expected to received his doctorate in May 2012, has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Kellogg Institute for International Relations for the extensive fieldwork he undertook in Guatemala, 2009-2011. Sullivan is also the Managing Editor for the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Thursday, 22 March 2012
War, Skills and Conflict: Evidence from the Partition of India
Steven I. Wilkinson
Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Yale University
This lecture examines the effects of war on political and social change, demonstrating how the organizational and killing skills acquired by Indian soldiers in WW2 help explain the occurrence of ethnic cleansing in India in 1947-49. Wilkinson shows that in districts that supplied large numbers of frontline soldiers, the levels of cleansing were much greater than in those districts that provided very few combat soldiers. This study uses a unique district-level dataset on violence and socio-economic factors in India from 1941-1951.
Wilkinson has previously worked on Hindu Muslim violence, which resulted in his award-winning book Votes and Violence (Cambridge 2004), and on the politics of clientelism (Kitschelt and Wilkinson, Patrons, Clients and Policies, Cambridge 2007). He is currently working on two projects: one a co-authored book project on war and political and social change, the other a book on colonial legacies and their effect on democracy, governance and conflict.
Thursday, 23 February 2012
In collaboration with the Uppsala Forum on Peace, Democracy and Justice.
Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations
Richard Ned Lebow
James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government, Dartmouth University and Olof Palme Visiting Professor, Lund University
In this lecture, Lebow asks: could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet; would the Cold War have ended as it did? Lebow will discuss how to develop protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and use them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments. Lebow’s research interests include international relations theory, psychological models of learning, conflict management and prevention, bargaining and negotiation, and methodologies including case studies, psychological experiments, and scenario generation. He has a distinguished publication record and his 12 books have won numerous awards.
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Dissident-State Interactions and Outcomes in the Arab Spring
Will H. Moore
Professor, Florida State University
Moore’s research focuses on violent conflict processes, including civil war, dissent and repression, human rights, and ethnic conflict. He has a prolific publication record in journals like International Organization, American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution.
In this lecture, Moore asks: what can explain the widely varied outcomes we have thus observed throughout the Middle East and North Africa in response to dissident claims for political change? This study searches for the answer among the cooperative to hostile actions taken by both states and dissidents, and explores specifically whether the patterns of cooperative--hostile interaction during 2011 have deviated substantially from those that existed during the 1990s and 2000s.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
For the autumn 2011 lectures, see Previous Speaker Series.
