The PAIS Seminar Series launches this Wednesday, October 14th, with a talk from Dr Kristin Bakke.

Kristin M. Bakke is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at University College London and Senior Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. She has previously taught at Leiden University and been a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research, focusing on self-determination struggles and post-war states, has appeared in journals such as Annals of American Association of Geographers, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. Her first book, Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec, was recently published with Cambridge University Press. She has received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Science Foundation (US), and the Norwegian Research Council. She is an associate editor at Journal of Peace Research and serves on the advisory board of Nations and Nationalism, editorial board of Journal of Global Security Studies, management committee of the European Network of Conflict Research, and council of the British Conflict Research Society.

Dr Bakke will be speaking to the title: 'War and Peace (and Institutions)'

One of the hotly debated policy prescriptions for states facing self-determination demands, from Iraq and Spain to Ukraine, is some form of decentralized governance—including regional autonomy arrangements and federalism—which grants minority groups a degree of self-rule. Yet the track record of existing decentralized states suggests that these have widely divergent capacity to contain conflicts within their borders. Through in-depth case studies, as well as a statistical cross-country analysis, Kristin M. Bakke shows in her recent book Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québecthat while policy, fiscal approach, and political decentralization can, indeed, be peace-preserving at times, the effects of these institutions are conditioned by traits of the societies they (are meant to) govern. There is no one-size-fits-all decentralized fix to deeply divided and conflict-ridden states. Decentralization may help preserve peace in one country or in one region, but it may have just the opposite effect in a country or region with different ethnic and economic characteristics.

The seminar takes place at 4pm, in LIB 2 and is welcome to all.

The PAIS Departmental Seminar Series is the focal point of the Department's research culture and activity. The objective is to engage critically and constructively with current research from staff members, their external collaborators, invited speakers, and visiting researchers. To see a full schedule, please see the Events and Seminars page.