Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation

Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation

Peacebuilding combined with conflict transformation is a holistic and multifaceted process that embraces conflict as a potentially constructive force. As such, it aims to reduce violence and protect and promote social justice, positive social relations and sustainable peace.

Building a just peace requires timely interventions designed at all levels of society (individual, collective, institutional), that respect the wider cultural context of the conflict. In this way, conflict transformation is typically a long-term process. It includes changing attitudes, behaviours, relationships, systems and structures that cause violence and, where necessary, it also means intensifying nonviolent resistance.

About our group

Our research critically analyses intervention in situations of violence including international peacebuilding, re-construction, transitional justice initiatives, counter-terrorism, and preventing violent extremism, and pays special attention to roles for international organizations, diaspora, civil society, youth, and nonviolent movements.

Our critical analysis recognizes that intervention must start with ourselves, our approach to, and openness to learning from, others and, in particular, our approach to research (not extractive; emancipatory; based on mutuality and equal partnership). This research is enhanced through a variety of international partnerships, staff and student exchanges, teaching, continuing professional development and training. Geographical areas include Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Funders include the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), British Academy, British Council, the European Commission, Erasmus+, Leverhulme Trust, National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Swedish Institute, the United Nations and a variety of NGOs.


Meet the team

 

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Bahar Baser, Associate Professor (Group Leader)

Politics and homeland conflicts, diaspora, Kurds, ethnic lobbying
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Chuck Thiessen, Associate Professor

International peacebuilding, preventing violent extremism, conflict resolution

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Aurelie Broeckerhoff, Research Fellow

Everyday diversity, consumer culture and markets
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Marwan Darweish, Associate Professor

Conflict transformation, non-violent civil resistance in conflict
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Elly Harrowell, Assistant Professor

Post-conflict reconstruction, gender, geographies of peace
Michaelina Jakala portrait

Michaelina Jakala, Assistant Professor

Everyday peacebuilding, reparation, justice, education and gender
Patricia Sellick portrait

Patricia Sellick, Associate Professor

Nonviolence and conflict transformation/ international non-governmental organisations
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Fabio Carbone, Associate, Lecturer

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Rachel Monaghan, Professor of Peace and Conflict

Informal justice, counter-terrorism, political violence

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Charlie Rumsby, Research Fellow

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Rana Aytug, Research Fellow


Project spotlight

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BUILDPEACE

This project aims to improve the provision of teaching, learning and training within the peacebuilding industry.

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Preventing conflict in fragile countries

This project builds sustainable partnerships with research organizations in 5 low-to-middle-income-countries (LMICs) to understand the relationship between informal/formal economic justice in conflict-affected societies.

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Compromising dignity?

This project responds to the experience of policymakers and practitioners working who find policies developed and implemented under the rubric of PVE to be ambiguous and vague, which can lead to dignity being compromised.

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On our land

A collaboration between CTPSR and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee. 30 young people living in the South Hebron Hills, have interviewed members of the oldest generation in thirty villages and hamlets to gather their intangible cultural heritage.

Youth, Violence and Conflict Transformation

Youth, Violence and Conflict Transformation

This project looks at how we to ensure that young people’s voices are listened to and acted upon in societies where youth marginalisation has been a factor facilitating their mobilisation into violence.


Past Events

Responsible Journalism and Communication in Divided and Conflicted Societies
Tuesday 15 September 2020 to Wednesday 16 September 2020
Scholars of Journalism, Political and Governmental Communication met in this innovative conference, to consider leading-edge developments in their respective fields, with opportunities for dialogue between them to foster mutual insight and collaboration. Selected papers from the conference will be gathered and presented for publication as an edited collection to a major international academic publisher.

Advancing Peace Geographies: Transformations, Collaborations and New Directions
15 - 16th July 2019, Coventry University
We contend that the intellectual ground opened up by peace geographies still holds untapped potential to advance critical and engaged scholarship in Peace Studies and Geography alike. Geographical understandings of place, space and scale open up new avenues to ground peacemaking processes in concrete spatio-temporal contexts. This conference provided an opportunity to take stock of progress made in the emerging field of peace geographies, with particular attention to radical intersections. We identified new directions for research and actively built bridges between researchers in different disciplines.

Conference - Politics, Policies & Diplomacy of Diaspora Governance
6th December 2018
Dr Bahar Baser worked with CTPSR PhD students Rana Aytung and Lee Daly, and Dr Henio Hoyo from the University of Monterrey in Mexico to organise a diaspora conference at The Freud Museum in London. The conference was attended by nearly 30 delegates who heard presentations from 18 speakers on diaspora issues in, amongst other countries, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco and Turkey.


 Queen’s Award for Enterprise Logo
University of the year shortlisted
QS Five Star Rating 2023