The study of violent political conflict at the macro level is siloed, fragmented, and based on arbitrary and incompatible categories. The study of interstate war is disconnected from the study of civil war or the study of terrorism. The speaker proposes a way to address these problems by reconceptualising political violence into a minimum number of categories covering the maximum amount of conceptual space with no overlaps. He describes the solution and discusses both its advantages and potential challenges.

Speaker:

Stathis N. Kalyvas

Stathis N. Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government and fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, where he directs the T. E. Lawrence Program on Conflict and Violence. Before joining Oxford in 2015, he held positions at Yale University, the University of Chicago, New York University and Ohio State University, as well as numerous visiting professorships and fellowships. He is the author, among others, of The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and the Oxford Handbook on Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2019). His current research focuses on global trends in political violence and conflict.

Discussant:

Dr Maria Varaki

Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law at the War Studies Department, King's College London, and co-director of the War Crimes Research Group. Before moving to London, she has held posts at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki, Kadir Has University in Istanbul, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the iCourts Centre at the University of Copenhagen. Additionally, she has worked for the OHCHR in Geneva, the UNHCR in New York and the Legal Advisory section of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Since November 2017, she is a member of the ILA Committee on Human Rights in times of emergency.