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 persons:
| Gemma van der Haar | Lotje de Vries |
| gemma.vanderhaar@wur.nl | lotje.devries@wur.nl |
Activities
The cluster engages in different activities and initiatives. In the past years we have presented our work at the annual CSPS days, including a discussion session on resistance and the role of the researcher (2018). We organized a film screening of ‘Ghost of our Forest’, co-produced by cluster member Lisa Trogisch. We organized a public lecture and master classes for PhD and MSc students, with Jeff Sluka from Massey University in New Zealand. The cluster established a PhD winter school called “Natural Resources and Conflict: Theorizing governance, resistance and violence”, which we aim to offer every year. Attached to the winter school were another public lecture and a master class by Prof Paul Richards. We organized a session at the 2019 Landac Annual conference on Everyday experiences of development and dispossession around megaprojects. More recently, we contributed to the development of a BSc minor on Resource governance and conflict: Searching for Justice.
RESEARCHERS
PhD candidates
Centre for Space, Place and Society 