Conflict@WUR

Conflict@WUR aims to engage staff members and PhD candidates across different groups and departments at Wageningen University in debates and joint activities around the study of conflict and violence.

VISION and SCOPE

Conflict and violence are undeniably part of development, but how to approach these issues theoretically and analytically is far from self-evident. The Conflict@WUR cluster offers a space to critically examine different theoretical framings of conflict and violence. The cluster brings together academics from a variety of social science backgrounds interested in reflecting on how to approach conflict and violence analytically and methodologically. We question orthodoxies and explore emerging propositions. The shared challenge is to understand the social (re-) production of conflict and violence by unpacking the multi-dimensional processes that unfold in the everyday, while studying connections across time and space. Members of the cluster, for instance, study conflict dynamics around natural resources, tourism, mobility, and political transitions. Broadly speaking, we explore these along two inter-related routes: the first concerns agency, looking into the social organisation of conflict, sense— and claim-making, and violence as a discursive construction and form of communication; the other concerns social and institutional ordering processes, including boundary construction, state formation, relations of power, and the politics of belonging.

CONTACT PERSON
Lotje de Vries, lotje.devries@wur.nl

ACTIVITIES
The cluster engages in different activities and initiatives, most importantly the organisation of various public lectures, conference panels, and education. Activities included, for instance, a film screening of ‘Ghost of our Forest’, co-produced by cluster member Lisa Trogisch, and the organisation of a panel on Everyday experiences of development and dispossession around megaprojects at the annual LANDac conference. The cluster also engages in various types of teaching, varying from contributing to the development of the BSc minor ‘Resource governance and conflict: Searching for Justice,’ to the organization of the PhD school “Natural Resources and Conflict: Violence, resistance and the state.” Lastly, we organize public lectures and master classes for PhD and MSc students. We have had the pleasure to host Jeff Sluka from Massey University in New Zealand; Paul Richards, Emiritus professor at Wageningen University; and An Ansoms, Professor at University of Louvain for public lectures and master classes. Upcoming are the public lectures by Mareike Schomerus, vice president of Busara Center Nairobi and Séverine Autesserre, Professor at Columbia University in New York in May and June 2021.