Dr Annette Idler: Uncertainty in War and Peace: The Security Impacts of Changing Orders

In this talk, Dr Annette Idler discusses her work as Principal Investigator of the multi-year AHRC-ESRC funded project “The Changing Character of Conflict Platform: Understanding, Tracing, and Forecasting Change across Time, Space, and Cultures” (www.conflictplatform.ox.ac.uk). The Conflict Platform promotes dialogue across methodologies and epistemologies, bringing together large data analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, complexity science, visualisation techniques, visual arts, and historical tracing back to the Thirty Years War. As part of this effort, she studies how changing orders during armed conflict as well as changes from war to peace impact on communities and societies. She argues that, in settings of armed multiparty conflicts, changes such as ceasefires or the demobilization of an armed actor induce uncertainty because the previously existing order and the rules of behaviour attached to it are no longer available. Uncertainty, in turn, undermines people’s security, reduces collective action, and diminishes the prospects of a prosperous society. The study is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in and on three hubs of instability that stand out through their protractedness and the convergence of armed conflict and organized crime: Colombia, Myanmar, and Somalia.

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