event Description
In January 2021, Professor Anastasia Shesterinina launched the Civil War Paths project: a multi-year, multi-country project that seeks to understand the different paths that civil wars follow from pre- to post-war stages building on immersive fieldwork by a team of ethnographic researchers in Colombia, Lebanon, Nepal, South Sudan, and other cases. The project redefines civil war as a social process that evolves through interactions between state, non-state, civilian and international actors. It deepens current understandings of how civil wars emerge, unfold and end, by centralising the shifting social interactions that underpin conflict and peace.
The talk will be an opportunity for Professor Shesterinina to introduce the analytical framework for mapping systems of relationships between civil war actors to enable locally informed and adaptive engagement in rapidly changing conflict contexts. The hope is to welcome a diverse range of communities of practice from Geneva into the conversation and to discuss this framework as a novel way of thinking and navigating the contingency that actors face in these contexts.
To register, please RSVP to maria.baltag@gpplatform.ch.
about the speaker
Professor Shesterinina is a Director of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War, UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow leading the Civil War Paths project, and Chair in Comparative Politics at the University of York. After receiving her PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, she was a Canada Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Her book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia published with Cornell University Press in 2021 received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award and the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies. Her work has appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, European Journal of International Relations, International Peacekeeping, and other outlets.
organisers
