We foster dynamic research communities known as clusters, each dedicated to exploring specific themes of contemporary relevance. These clusters serve as vibrant platforms for discussion, collaboration, and innovation across various fields.
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.
We foster dynamic research communities known as cluster, each dedicated to exploring specific themes of contemporary relevance. These clusters serve a vibrant platforms for discussion, collaboration and innovation across various fields.
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 screenings and panel organisations, for instance at the annual LANDac conference. The cluster also engages in various types of teaching, ranging from contributing to the development of the BSc minor ‘Resource governance and conflict: Searching for Justice,’ teaching in different PhD schools. 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; An Ansoms, Professor at University of Louvain for public lectures and master classes; Mareike Schomerus, vice president of Busara Center Nairobi; and Séverine Autesserre, Professor at Columbia University in New York in recent years.
CSPS hosts and promotes lectures, seminars, workshops and other events connected to its research clusters and wider academic community.
