Projects

Our research projects are varied and cover several areas of international politics.

Current or recently funded projects

The secret life-changes of norms: A comprehensive analysis of norm change

Economic And Social Research Council

Led by Professor Ulrich Petersohn: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FX003809%2F1

Research focusing on international norms has grown substantially over the course of the last three decades. While scholars have produced a tremendous number of insights, surprisingly few generalizable results have been generated. This is because norm research relies overwhelmingly on comparative or case studies. Such studies are precision instruments that analyze the change of a single norm and tend to restrict investigations to a specific policy field, which prevents generalization. As a result, the study of international norms is akin to studies of war prior to the development of larger datasets. Until datasets were available, researchers were unaware of certain empirical patterns that today form crucial research projects, e.g. the democratic peace or dangerous dyads. In short, current norm research may not even be aware of what is unknown. The main obstacle to remedying this situation is the lack of a large dataset recording information on norms; this makes it impossible to reliably identify potentially empirical patterns. Therefore, this project will aim to address this shortfall. It will break new ground by developing the Norm Dynamic Database, which records norm changes across time and several policy fields. This will facilitate the identification of patterns of norm change yet unknown and open the door to quantitative norm research.

Better Together: Rebel Mergers in Intra-state Conflict

British Academy

Led by: Dr Chelsea Johnson

Contemporary intra-state conflicts often involve multiple armed groups, and in recent years, academic work has increasingly recognised the potential for group fluidity in such contexts. Much of this literature focuses on the effect of rebel alliances on conflict-related outcomes, such as duration, intensity, or the likelihood of a settlement. Few have analysed alliances as the outcome to be explained, and of these, none have disaggregated different degrees of cooperation. This project aims to fill this gap by investigating the phenomenon of rebel mergers as specific form of conflict transformation. It relies on a mixed-method qualitative approach, combining a cross-national analysis of 21 case studies of merger events in Sub-Saharan Africa with interviews of ex-rebel officers involved in the integration of three discrete rebellions in Côte d’Ivoire in 2003. The research findings speak to the causes of shifting coalitions—one of the biggest challenges of negotiating peace in multi-party contexts.

Anti-fascist Solidarity and the League of Nations, 1936-1939

HLC Early Career and Returners Fund & HLC Learning and Teaching Fund

Co-led by: Dr Nicola Mathieson

This interdisciplinary project in partnership with Languages, Cultures and Film and History is the first to map written communications sent to the League of Nations (LoN) in the late 1930s by antifascist organisations on (non)intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This project seeks to better understand the transnational and multilingual networks of these grassroots organisations and the role these networks would play in their future development during and after World War II. Bringing together approaches and methodologies from across History, Political Sciences including IR, and Modern Languages, this timely project illuminates what so-far overlooked archival records can tell us about the history of interaction between the public, political grassroots organisations, and the LoN. In doing so, it will also contribute to a better understanding of this crucial moment in the emerging global history of anti-fascist activism that have to date been isolated to national contexts.

Democratization and UN Peacebuilding

Economic And Social Research Council

Co-led by Dr Birte Julia Gippert: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR004161%2F1

Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations (UN) has devoted immense human and financial resources to peacebuilding operations in war-torn states. These efforts have emphasized the role that inclusive democratic politics can play in fostering transitions to long-term peace. However, a majority of peacebuilding missions in the post-Cold War period have been followed by authoritarian rather than democratic regimes (Zürcher et al. 2013). Recently, scholars have begun to ask if international peacebuilders may be one of the causes of such authoritarian outcomes in post-conflict settings (Gowan 2015; von Billerbeck 2016), but there has been no systematic study of this relationship. In this project, we therefore seek to examine the relationship between peacebuilding and authoritarianism and the ways in which peacebuilding shapes authoritarianism at the local level.