Conflict is a fundamental part of society. What have seemingly unrelated phenomena such as bullying at school, political attacks between parties during election campaigns, political assassinations, or the escalation of violence and bloodshed between armed groups have in common? In short: What is conflict, through which mechanisms does it emerge, and how does it impact social interactions among individuals, groups, and societies? 

Different levels and forms of conflict

The Conflict & Society RPA proposes an integrated framework to investigate the evolution of conflict across forms (violent and non-violent), and levels (groups and individuals). While the field is ripe with investigations that tackle these different forms and levels separately, what is often missing from existing scholarship is research into the relationships between different levels and forms of conflict.

Research approach

We approach this through two related questions:

• When and under which conditions does non-violent conflict turn violent (escalation)? And when and under which conditions does the opposite happen (de-escalation)?
• When and under which conditions do group-level conflicts lead to conflicts among individuals (top-down propagation)? And when and under which conditions does the opposite happen (bottom-up propagation)?

To answer these questions, our RPA will bring together the FMG experts across all four domains to facilitate cutting-edge research to answer such questions, offer mentorship to early career colleagues and students, and engage societal organizations and public institutions navigating conflicts. As a key feature of society, conflict is a well-established research area, but remains dispersed among FMG researchers in separate sub-faculty domains. By fostering collaborations and leveraging insights across political science, international relations, psychology, communication science, pedagogical science, sociology, anthropology, and geography, the RPA we propose aims to formalize and develop an integrated research agenda on:

• the forms and levels of societal conflict
• their drivers and consequences
• the dynamics of conflict (de)escalation, that is, when conflicts become more (less) violent
• the dynamics of conflict propagation towards individuals (top-down) and towards groups (bottom-up)

Principal Investigators

RPA Board

Lead researchers involved in developing this proposal and who will form the core of the initial affiliated staff include:

• Laurens Bakker and Erella Grassiani (Anthropology)
• Machteld Hoeve, Eveline van Vugt and Ivy Defoe (Child Development and Education)
• Rivke Jaffe and Mieke Lopes Cardozo (GPIO)
• Ursula Daxecker, Martijn Dekker, Imke Harbers, Polly Pallister-Wilkins and Jessica Soedirgo (Political Science)
• Marc Heerdink (Psychology)