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ESRC Doctoral Research Fellow Jennifer Philippa Eggert will be giving a talk at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon on 24 October. Jennifer will present findings of my research on female fighters during the Lebanese Civil War.

Abstract: What role do women have in times of war and violent conflict? In much of the literature on political violence, the role of women is either completely omitted or women are seen as victims or actors for peaceful change only. The fact that in most conflicts worldwide, women, too, perpetrate and facilitate violence is often overlooked. This is no different in the majority of the literature on the Lebanese Civil War, despite the fact that women played an active role in practically all militias that were operating in Lebanon during the war. Taking into account individual motivations, organizational characteristics, societal factors as well as the security context, this talk explains the phenomenon of female fighters during the Lebanese Civil War. Based on interviews with former militia members, it undertakes a comparison of women’s inclusion in the different politico-military groups that were active during the war and highlights why women were employed as combatants in some of the militias, whereas they assumed supportive roles only in others.

Dr. has been awarded a grant from the RCUK Global Challenges Research Fund (AHRC-ESRC-NERC) for a project on 'Why We Disagree About Resilience'.

The project will involve working on urban resilience with partners across several disciplines in Cape Town, Nairobi and Manilla. The funding will further strengthen PAIS's work on .

PAIS GEM Fellow has edited, together with Prof. Joachim A. Koops (Vesalius College Brussels), the most recent Special Issue of International Peacekeeping titled ‘A European Return to United Nations Peacekeeping?’.

The main rationale of this collection of articles is to provide in-depth case studies of a selected sample of European countries in order to assess the opportunities, challenges and future possibilities of a ‘European return to UN peacekeeping’. The articles consist of both policy papers and theory-guided research in order to connect the analysis of recent and policy-oriented developments to wider and more general theoretical debates on the supply of peacekeeping troops and on the history, track-record and future potentials of European approaches to blue helmet operations.

The issue takes stock of nine key European countries: France (Thierry Tardy), UK (David Curran and Paul D. Williams), Germany (Joachim A. Koops), Italy (Giulia Tercovich), The Netherlands (Niels van Willigen), Ireland (Raymond Murphy), Denmark (Peter Viggo Jakobsen), Sweden (Kristina Zetterlund and Claes Nilsson) and Norway (John Karlsrud and Kari Osland).

The Special Issue is available here:

, ESRC Doctoral Research Fellow in PAIS, has written a blog for Connect Futures on why we need gendered approaches to counter-extremism.

Jennifer's piece can be read here:

We are thrilled to announce to all students and staff that PAIS is ranked 3rd out of 79 Politics Departments in .

We are ranked 1st for both the student experience and teaching quality in the entire Russell Group of elite Politics Departments.

Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams, Head of PAIS, commented: “Congratulations to all students and staff on this outstanding performance. This latest ranking in The Times/Sunday Times is yet further evidence of PAIS’ position as one of the UK’s leading all-round Politics and International Studies Departments. Our deep commitment as a community of scholars to tackling some of the biggest global challenges today — inequality, education, migration, climate change, conflict, to name only a few — means that our cutting-edge research feeds directly into our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The strengths and benefits of this symbiotic approach to research and teaching is reflected time and time again in our consistent appearance at the very top of all major league tables in the UK and beyond".

Thank you to all our students and staff for PAIS' continued success.

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