Scientific Committee
Kristin M. Bakke is Professor in Political Science and International Relations. She teaches in UCL’s Department of Political Science, in the School of Public Policy, and in the program on European and International Social and Political Studies. She is a co-founder of UCL's Conflict & Change research cluster.
Linda J. Bilmes is Co-chair of Economists for Peace and Security and teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. She served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1998 to 2001. She is a member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA). Her research examines the fiscal costs of post-9/11 wars, how conflicts are funded, and their impacts on veterans and public institutions.
Lars-Erik Cederman is a Swedish–Swiss political scientist specializing in armed conflict, civil war, ethnic inequality, nationalism, and state formation. His work links macrohistorical dynamics of state formation and nationalism to contemporary political violence, showing how ethnopolitical and ethno-economic inequalities fuel conflict and how power-sharing can reduce risk. He leads the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) Dataset Family.
Michelle R. Garfinkel is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines conflict and cooperation within and between nations, as well as credibility and politics in domestic policy, with publications in the American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Economics & Politics, Public Choice, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. She is affiliated with UCI’s Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals.
Scott Gates is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, working on civil war, political violence, governance, and applied game theory. He led PRIO’s Centre for the Study of Civil War, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence, from 2003 to 2012. He serves on the editorial leadership of the Journal of Peace Research.
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Regius Professor of Political Science at the University of Essex, director of the Michael Nicholson Centre for Conflict and Cooperation, and a research associate at PRIO. His research spans conflict and cooperation, democratization, and the spatial dynamics of political processes.
Anke Hoeffler is Professor of Development Research and leads the working group in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Her interdisciplinary research examines the social drivers of excess morbidity and mortality and fosters cross-field collaboration on violence-related topics. She is a research affiliate of the International Security and Development Center’s global project “Life with Corona” (since March 2020). In June 2018 she was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and before joining Konstanz she was a research officer at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies.
Patricia Justino is Deputy Director of UNU-WIDER. A leading expert on political violence and development, she co-founded and co-directs the Households in Conflict Network. Her research examines how political violence, institutional change, inequality, and social trust shape governance and development outcomes. She has led major programmes funded by the European Commission, ESRC, and DFID, and has advised organizations including FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, UN Women, USAID, and the World Bank.
Arzu Kibris is a political scientist in the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), University of Warwick. Their research examines the dynamics and social, political, and economic consequences of civil conflict, combining formal theory, experiments, and empirical analysis. They are Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project EXPOVIBE (“Exposure to Political Violence and Individual Behavior”), which studies individual-level effects of exposure to political violence in civil war contexts. Affiliations include Executive Coordinator of the Network of European Peace Scientists (NEPS), affiliate of the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), and Network Professor at Sabancı University.
Syed Mansoob Murshed is Professor of the Economics of Peace and Conflict at the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University). He was the inaugural holder of the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity (2003) and a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. His research spans the economics of conflict, resource abundance, aid conditionality, political economy, macroeconomics, and international economics.
Solomon W. Polachek is Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University (SUNY) and a leading labor and political-economy scholar. He edits Research in Labor Economics, serves on multiple editorial boards, and is a Research Fellow at IZA. His research applies life-cycle models to earnings differences — especially by gender — and integrates economics and political science to explain international conflict and cooperation. Honors include the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and leadership of the Peace Science Society (1999–2000) and the Eastern Economic Association (2014–2015).
Dominic Rohner is Professor of Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute and University of Lausanne. His work in development and political economics focuses on the causes and consequences of armed conflict, institutions, and peace-building policy. He is a CEPR Research Fellow and leads CEPR’s Research & Policy Network on Preventing Conflict; he also serves as Research Director of the ReCIPE programme on “Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy.”
Todd Sandler is Chair Emeritus of Economics and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). His research applies game theory and microeconomics to conflict-related collective action—covering transnational terrorism, defense alliances, peacekeeping, and global/regional public goods in fragile settings. Since 9/11, he has advanced theoretical and empirical analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism. Key books include The Political Economy of Terrorism (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2012), Global Collective Action (Cambridge, 2004), and The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Club Goods (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 1996). He has published widely across leading journals and consulted for UNDP, the World Bank, and other international organizations.
Carlos Seiglie is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at Rutgers–Newark, and faculty in the Division of Global Affairs. His research spans applied microeconomics, defense economics, and international economics. He also serves on several editorial boards. He holds a BA from Rutgers and a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, has taught at Columbia, the Helsinki School of Economics (now Aalto), and Université Pierre Mendès-France, and consults for public and private institutions.
Marijke Verpoorten is Professor at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp. Her research examines the economic causes and consequences of armed conflict, natural resources, global supply chains, and magicoreligious beliefs, with regional focus on Rwanda, Benin, and DR Congo. She holds a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven and has affiliations spanning LICOS, ASE (Benin), and CEGEMI (Bukavu).
Christos Kollias is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Thessaly and Editor of Defence and Peace Economics. His research focuses on defence economics, terrorism, and international political economy, including influential work on Greek–Turkish security dynamics and the market impacts of terrorist shocks. He serves on Editorial Boards of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy and The Economics of Peace and Security Journal.
Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Associate Editor of the Journal of Peace Research. In 2025, he is a Senior Fellow at The Politics of Inequality excellence cluster, University of Konstanz. Much of his research concerns security dimensions of climate change, which has received funding from the European Union, the World Bank, the US Department of Defense, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the Research Council of Norway. He is the recipient of ISA's 2015 Karl Deutsch Award; principal investigator for two ERC projects (Consolidator Grant 2015-2021; Advanced Grant 2022-27), and chapter Lead Author in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2022).
Idean Salehyan is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas, Executive Director of the Peace Science Society (International), and co-Director of the Social Conflict Analysis Database. He is also Senior Fellow for Immigration Policy at the Niskanen Center and a Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center at SMU. His research spans international and civil conflict, international migration, and refugee studies; he teaches international relations, comparative politics, civil war, and ethnic politics. His policy work focuses on pragmatic, evidence-based approaches to managing forced migration.
