On Thursday 9th November, Jonathan Luke Austin (Lead Researcher at the Violence Prevention Initiative) presented findings from the Initiative in a lecture entitled ‘Designing Against Evil: Breakthroughs in Violence Prevention.’ The lecture was followed by a panel discussion with Professors Keith Krause and Anna Leander of the Graduate Institute and Vincent Ballon, Head of the … Continue reading Designing Against Evil
The VIPRE Initiative’s latest publication Becoming a Torturer: Towards a Global Ergonomics of Care is now available. Published within the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Review, this peer-reviewed publication draws on Lead Researcher of VIPRE Jonathan Luke Austin’s theoretical understanding of the process by which individuals unintentionally carry out aberrant violences like torture. Combined with primary source … Continue reading Publication | Becoming a Torturer
The VIPRE Initiative’s latest publication is now available, below or by clicking here. The concept note lays out the contours of the Initiative for both interested academics and practitioners. Abstract The Violence Prevention (VIPRE) Initiative explores novel approaches to preventing violent abuses carried out most frequently by state agents in contexts of conflict. The Initiative … Continue reading VIPRE Concept Note | The Germination of Abusive Violence
The VIPRE Initiative is very pleased to have recruited two new doctoral students to join its team as Research Assistants for the project. The two PhD students – Alice Baroni and Basil Farraj – are both very promising young researchers whose own interests overlap with, complement, and extend those of the VIPRE Initiative. The doctoral … Continue reading Two PhD Students Join VIPRE
The VIPRE Initiative has the pleasure of announcing its significantly expanded scientific advisory board. At present, we have the privilege of being associated with the leading scholars listed below. Each possesses particular expertise of relevance to the VIPRE initiative, including: field defining work on the theory and method of critical approaches to IR and IPS … Continue reading VIPRE Board Expands
A few weeks ago, the Lead Researcher of the VIPRE Initiative – Jonathan Luke Austin – participated in several events at the annual International Studies Association conference in Baltimore. Austin presented several core papers relating to the VIPRE Initiative including one entitled Logics of Change-Making in World Politics that lays out the programmatic intellectual basis for the … Continue reading VIPRE at the International Studies Association
Recent investigative journalism reports have uncovered disturbing evidence of torture, enforced disappearances, and other forms of human rights abuses occurring at the hands of US-funded police and intelligence agencies in Kenya (as well as across Africa). Research from the Angaza Foundation for African Reporting has traced the connections between these instances of abuse to US-funded counter-terrorism … Continue reading Torture and Counter-Terrorism in Nairobi
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has awarded funding of CHF 1,070,688 to support a four-year research project based at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). The project, the Violence Prevention (VIPRE) Initiative, explores novel approaches to preventing state-led political violence. It suggests that it is possible to prevent political violence in a similar way to that by which we prevent, or minimise the damage caused by, public health problems like traffic accidents, smoking, alcoholism, infectious diseases or firearm-related deaths. Efforts to prevent these problems focus not simply on the “original causes” of harm (driving while intoxicated, for example) but also on mitigating the risk of harm and/or damage inflicted once these original causes are set in motion by placing “intervening” obstacles or “firewalls” in front of these risks/harms (constructing crash barriers on roads or cars that beep when seatbelts are not worn, for example). The VIPRE Initiative will theorise, empirically explore, and test the possibility of constructing similar barriers or firewalls vis-à-vis political violence by drawing on interdisciplinary insights from organisation studies, the microsociological study of violence and International Political Sociology.
Continue reading “Swiss National Science Foundation funds VIPRE”
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