Profile
Eliza Urwin is Head of Research at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). In this role, she oversees the Centre’s research strategy and supports a community of over 70 faculty associates, fellows, researchers, and research associates. Under her leadership, the CCDP serves as the Graduate Institute’s focal point for advanced research on conflict analysis, peacebuilding, and the interconnections between security, justice, development, and governance in fragile and complex contexts worldwide. She oversees the Centre’s current research portfolio of more than CHF 13 million in competitive grant funding, fostering collaborations across academia, policy, and practice.
Her research examines how governance functions where the state is weak or absent, how people navigate and resist authority in such contexts, and how non-state actors provide public goods. She specializes in participatory research methods, especially Everyday Peace Indicators, and applies these methods in research, as well as monitoring and evaluation. A third strand of her research asks what works and what does not in development and statebuilding, with a focus on subnational governance, social cohesion, and reconciliation.
Since 2017 she has been a researcher and board member of the Everyday Peace Indicators project, leading research, training, and indicator generation in Colombia, Tunisia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She is the grantee and lead applicant of an SNSF Agora project to develop a public portal that makes Everyday Peace Indicators accessible to policy and public audiences. From 2013 to 2017 she worked in Afghanistan as a Senior Program Officer with the United States Institute of Peace, managing research and piloting methods to assess program effectiveness. She is also an expert with the Centre on Armed Groups, contributing to a global network focused on conflict and violence across more than 30 countries and territories.
Research Areas
Everyday peace and governance in fragile contexts
Participatory and qualitative research methods
Subnational governance and social cohesion
Statebuilding and legitimacy
Gender, conflict, and peacebuilding
Selected Policy Reports
Outcome Document 4: Roundtable on Democracy and the New Security Agenda – Strengthening Democratic Resilience in a Changing European and Transatlantic Security Landscape. Understanding the links between multilateralism and democracy to tackle global challenges more effectively.
August 2025.
Leadership of Research Projects
Principal Investigator – Everyday Peace Indicators: Visualizing Local Voices
Selected Publications
Tapscott, R., & Urwin, E. (2024). The Origins and Legacies of Unpredictability in Rebel-Incumbent Rule. Civil Wars, 27(3), 652–679.
Urwin, E., Botoeva, A., Arias, R., Vargas, O., & Firchow, P. (2023). Flipping the power dynamics in measurement and evaluation: International aid and the potential for a grounded accountability model. Negotiation journal, 39(4), 401-426.
Firchow, P., & Urwin, E. (2020). Not Just at Home or In The Grave: (Mis)Understanding Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 16(1), 59–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2020.1812893
PhD Thesis
Negotiating the State: Communities and Social Order in Conflict.
PhD Supervisor and Co-Supervisor: Keith Krause and Elisabeth Prügl