Researching Peace - a podcast by Uppsala University

In this summer special, Karen Brounéus, professor in peace and conflict research and clinical psychologist, offers practical advice to researchers and others whose work requires them to continuously ingest material containing descriptions of violence and suffering.

RESOURCES

A transcription of this episode is available on the department website: https://www.uu.se/download/18.3d4f842919ed45a4aad24a/1781682034077/%2349%20The%20importance%20of%20self-care%20when%20researching%20violence.pdf

For more on Karen’s own journey and her research, please see episode #40.

For further reading, we recommend this excellent, easy-to-read piece by WHO: “Doing what matters in times of stress: An illustrated guide”: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003927

For a survey and analysis on the experiences of collecting conflict data, please see this recent article in the Journal of Peace Research, titled Researching Human Rights Violations: Assessing Research-related Stress Among Research Assistants.” The article is available open access on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251370495

This special episode presents a recording of the 2026 Peter Wallensteen Lecture, which took place in Uppsala, Sweden on 20 May 2026. Professor T.V. Paul delivered a riveting analysis of how the pursuit of status affects the decisions of great powers.

 

The first question during the Q&A was asked the by Jan Eliasson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs. Professor Peter Wallensteen himself offered the concluding question.

 

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The annual Peter Wallensteen Lecture honours the department’s founder, Professor Peter Wallensteen and his enduring legacy in peace studies.

T.V. Paul is Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In this episode, we discuss nuclear proliferation and disarmament in the Nordic region with Professor Thomas Jonter. In response to the rapidly shifting security landscape of the Nordics and the Baltic Sea region, the AMC working group, which Thomas leads, has increasingly focused on this region. 

 

Read more about the working group and their research: https://www.uu.se/4.28afe6b218c4313625918573.html

 

A transcript of this episode is available on our website:

https://www.uu.se/download/18.7b07d1fb19ddcad926649530/1778586543292/Thomas%20transcription.pdf

Our researcher Sebastian van Baalen and his team are conducting the most extensive study of election boycotts to date. In this episode, we ask him why political parties or candidates choose to drop out of elections and what they hope to achieve by doing so. What can we learn from their multifaceted reasons for opting out? Why are incumbents often afraid of such boycotts? What role does humour play?

 

Sebastian is the project leader for the ongoing research project “Opting out? Explaining the effectiveness of election boycotts”. Working with researchers Gudlaug Olafsdottir and Jesper Bjarnesen (The Nordic Africa Institute), the project has constructed the largest dataset so far on election boycotts, compiling new data on all election boycotts worldwide between 1945 and 2025.

Further resources

Read more about Sebastian's project on the DPCR website: https://www.uu.se/en/department/peace-and-conflict-research/research/research-projects/opting-out-explaining-the-effectiveness-of-election-boycotts

A transcript of this episode is available on our website: https://www.uu.se/download/18.12d27b2919db51d4e285378/1776953932007/Sebastian%20van%20Baalen.pdf

In this episode, we discuss power-sharing as a tool for ethnic conflict management with Alexandre Raffoul, who recently defended his thesis on the subject. His dissertation sheds light on the understudied concept of “associational power-sharing”, and his data reveal some striking findings. 

 

Resources:

The extensive summary (Kappa) of Alexandre's dissertation "The Logics of Multi-Ethnic Coalitions: Power-Sharing, Party Systems, and Ethnic Conflict Management" is available here: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2024657&dswid=4385

The first essay, “Practicing Power-Sharing: How Political Adversaries (Fail to) Rule Jointly”, is available open access in Nations and Nationalism: https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.13110

The second essay, "Unstable Concepts, Unresolved Controversies: Reassembling Power-Sharing, Consociationalism, and Centripetalism", is published open access in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics: https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2025.2488577