Research Priority Area
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?
The RPA Conflict & Society has formally launched the first round of seed grants. These grants, up to €20,000 per grant, are intended to foster research within the FMG community about 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.
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We approach this through two related questions:
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:
Lead researchers involved in developing this proposal and who will form the core of the initial affiliated staff include:
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