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.
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