Prorector Anders Malmberg presents the official statement for awarding the Rudbeck medal, while Rector Eva Åkesson and laureate Professor Peter Wallensteen listen, at the Uppsala University Conferment Ceremony (Promotionen in Swedish), January 27, 2012.
Peter Wallensteen, holder of the Dag Hammarskjöld Chair at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research and Richard. G Starmann, Sr., Research Professor of Peace Studies at University of Notre Dame, USA, has been awarded the Rudbeck medal of 2011. It was given out at the Doctoral Conferment Ceremony, January 27, 2012. This medal was established by Uppsala University in 2002 in memory of Professor Olof Rudbeck Sr. 300 years after his passing, in order to award outstanding research achievements attained at Uppsala University.
The official statement reads: 'His internationally acknowledged research has among other topics focused on peaceful conflict resolution through mediation. During several decades he has been at the forefront in developing the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University to a leading international research milieu and he is also the founder of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which maps armed conflicts and peace agreements on a global scale.
East Asian Peace Highlights
Participants of the EAP First Annual Conference:
From front to left: Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, Wang Dong, Hoang Anh Tuan, Wang Yizhou, Zou Keyuan, Peter Wallensteen (behind), Isak Svensson, Moon Chung-in, Susanne Schaftenaar, Thommy Svensson, Stein Tønnesson, Erik Melander. Standing from left: Mei Shanshan, Jong Kun Choi, Tang Chih-Mao, Ryu Yongwook, Anders Engvall, Bates Gill, Thomas Nielsen, Robert S. Ross, Mikael Weissmann, Elin Bjarnegård, Timo Kivimäki, Börje Ljunggren.
The East Asian Peace (EAP) program has passed its first year. Among our several publications, the 2011 highlight is Isak Svensson and Mathilda Lindgren’s article ‘From Bombs to Banners,’ which appeared in Security Dialogue. This article adds a plausible explanatory factor that we did not consider when we submitted our program proposal to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in 2010. We thought only about state behaviour. However, we did not restrict our research proposal to international peace, but also included internal or ‘civil peace’ in what we set out to explain. Civil peace does not only depend on governments, but also on rebel behaviour. What Svensson and Lindgren suggest is that there has been a change over time in rebel behaviour from rural guerrilla struggles to city-based un-armed revolts: from ‘bombs to banners’ or from ‘People’s War to People Power.’ This has now become an essential part of the EAP research agenda. Another strength in Svensson and Lindgren’s article is its comparative framework. It speaks not just of East Asia, but asks if there is a global trend away from armed violence in rebel behaviour. Just as the article went to press, events in the Arab world put the thesis to a test. Tunisia confirmed the trend. Egypt too, at first. Libya and Syria did not. Svensson and Tönnesson will follow up with a paper for the International Studies Association convention in San Diego in April 2012, comparing rebellions in East Asia and the Middle East.
Other EAP achievements in 2011 were to organize the first Annual Conference in September, establish Susanne Schaftenaar’s program office at Uppsala University, enter into contractual relations with all of the program’s 22 researchers and research associates as well as the eight members of the Advisory Board, and engage in heated scholarly discussions over hypotheses that shall prove their value in the coming years. We also organized two panels on the ‘capitalist peace’ at the AAS-ICAS convention in Honolulu in May, where program leader Stein Tönnesson proudly received the 2011 ICAS book prize in the Humanities for his Vietnam 1946: How the War Began.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Discuss with Peace Researchers
2011 Peace Prize winners, Leymah Gbowee, Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman, Yemen, visited Uppsala University on December 13, 2011 and responded to questions from a panel of young researchers and students. Peace researchers were heavily represented. The questions dealt with issues of non-violence, peacebuilding as well as sources of inspiration and nominations for the next Peace Prize. The two laureates were warmly received by the Uppsala audience filling the main auditorium of the university.
From left: Dr. Anders Themnér and Ph.D. candidate Mathilda Lindgren, both at the Department, then Mrs Leymah Gbowee, and Professor Peter Wallensteen, chairing the session, Mrs Tawakkul Karman with her interpreter, followed by Ms. Lena Ag, Secretary-General of the women’s organization Kvinna-till-kvinna and two students from UF (The Uppsala Association of International Affairs/Utrikespolitiska föreningen) Malin Bergwik and Carl Hvenmark Nilsson, both program secretaries of the association. The laureates were greeted by outgoing Deputy Rector (prorektor), Professor Kerstin Sahlin (not in the picture).
Click here to watch the lecture.
National Conference on Peace and Conflict Research for PhD candidates
On 15-16 December, the Department hosted the biannual National Conference on Peace and Conflict Research for PhD candidates, sponsored by Folke Bernadotte Academy. The conference saw broad participation of PhD students active in research environments throughout Sweden, who presented and discussed their ongoing work in workshop sessions during the two days. The conference was opened by Peter Wallensteen, Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research (DPCR), followed by a keynote speech on the theme “New Directions in Peace and Conflict Research”, delivered by Séverine Autesserre, Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. In her speech, Professor Autesserre addressed the growing interest in micro-level processes in peace and conflict research, making reference to how this focus united many of the PhD projects represented at the conference.
Day two of the conference began with a roundtable discussion on publishing and how PhD students should approach this issue, chaired by Mats Hammarström, Associate Professor, DPRC, and featuring Professor Nils Petter Gleditsch from PRIO, Oslo, Associate Professor Kristine Höglund, DPCR, Associate Professor Jan Ångström, DPCR, and Visiting Scholar Allan Dafoe, DPCR. The conference concluded in the afternoon of Friday 16 December on a very positive note and with hopes of continued contacts and exchanges until the next conference, to be arranged by one of the other participating universities.
New data release: UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED) version 1.0-2011
The move of the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) across Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Sudan between 1995 and 2010. White dots represent the oldest activity, followed in order by blue, green, yellow and red dots. Larger and darker dots represent higher fatality estimates.
Today, 8 December, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program released its latest dataset; the UCDP GED version 1.0-2011. The UCDP GED is an event-based and georeferenced dataset on organized violence, detailing all of the UCDP’s categories of violence (state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence) in Africa between 1989 and 2010 at the level of the individual event of violence.
In contrast to the UCDP’s country-year datasets, that are separated between different datasets depending on the type of violence they track, the UCDP GED contains data on all types of organized violence, disaggregated spatially and temporally down to the level of the individual incidents of fatal violence. Each event comes complete with date of the event, place of the event (with coordinates), actors participating in the event, estimates of fatalities, as well as variables that denote the certainty with which these data are known.
This version of the dataset comes in a point format, georeferenced using the WGS84 datum and is compatible with most GIS software. Further updates during December 2011 and January 2012 will contain polygons of conflict zones, as well as onset data in point and polygon formats (shapefile format for use in ArcGIS). This first release of data contains all of those events that appear in years when a dyad or actor crosses the 25 fatalities threshold; future updates will contain events beyond these so-called ‘active years’, as well as data on actors and dyads that have never crossed this threshold. This version of the dataset contains approximately 24 000 individual events of violence.
This new dataset allows for the analysis of the causes, dynamics and resolution of organized violence at a level of analysis below the state system. The data can be conjoined with other sub-state data, such as disaggregated information on population, economy and the environment to allow for types of analyses and answer questions that country-level cannot address.
The UCDP has been working on coding and organizing these data for approximately 2,5 years, with a research group of approximately 15 project managers and research assistants. The data have been thoroughly checked and double-checked, both manually and through automated scripts, so as to ensure the integrity and usability of the product. We hope you like it.
Questions, comments and any errors should be directed to the project manager, Ralph Sundberg (ralph.sundberg@pcr.uu.se).
For detailed and interactive maps please see the UCDP GED project page at http://ucdp.uu.se/ged/
A comparison of coverage and quality of UCDP GED to ACLED can be found in the following article: Eck, Kristine (2012) "In Data We Trust? A Comparison of UCDP GED and ACLED Conflict Events Datasets,"Cooperation and Conflict 47(1): forthcoming.
For the press release, please click here (in Swedish)
Expert evaluation gives high marks to the Department’s Research
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.
The peer-review panel rates the Department’s research overall as being of “internationally high standard.” The panel identifies several strong areas, specifically pointing to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program as being of top quality and a University “flagship” noting that “ [t]here is no comparable data set internationally in this area.”
The panel also notes that Department faculty is highly successful in publishing their research:
“A publication list of this magnitude is an achievement for a department that also has teaching responsibilities. The success may be explained by several factors: adequate funding, organizational and intellectual coherence, careful recruiting, an organizational culture of ‘competitive collegiality’… and manageable teaching loads.”
The bibliometric component of the evaluation reinforces this picture. Of all the departments at Uppsala University, Peace and Conflict Research comes out as the best cited department with the highest proportion of highly cited articles. The bibliometric study, which includes publications from 2007-2010, shows that the articles published by the Department’s faculty are 230% more cited than the world average for the field (based on the mean normalized citation score, MNCS).
Contact persons for further information on the Department:
Magnus Öberg (Head of Department)
Phone: +46 (0)18 471 27 87
Fax: +46 (0)18 69 51 02
E-mail: Magnus.Oberg@pcr.uu.se
Jan Ångström (Director of Studies)
Phone: +46 (0)18-471 23 27
Fax: +46 (0)18 69 51 02
E-mail: Jan.Angstrom@pcr.uu.se
Kristine Höglund (Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict, Director of Studies of the PhD Program)
Phone: +46 (0)18- 471 63 87
Fax: +46 (0)18-69 51 02
E-mail: phdprogramme@pcr.uu.se
More news from the Department
Royal Couple Attends Informal Seminar at the Department
The Nobel Peace Prize 2011
The Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture 2011
Peace Research: Theory and Practice – Wallensteen’s new book describes the development of the field
The department welcomes all new and old students!
The UCDP’s latest data on armed conflicts in 2010 published in Journal of Peace Research
In Memoriam: Ulf Himmelstrand 1924-2011
New Doctors in Peace Research
In Memoriam: Jacob Bercovitch - Pioneer of Mediation Research
Master's Cermony 2011
Uppsala University named Rotary Peace Center in stiff competition
The UCDP receives Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Data Set Award, 2011
For more news, please see News Archive
