The Higher Research Seminar: ‘Multi-Level Conflict and Violence against Civilians in South Sudan’ – Jana Krause, University of Oslo

Wednesdays 13.15 to 14.30 in Eden 367, unless otherwise indicated. 

Chair: Associate Professor Lisa Strömbom

The Department’s Higher Research Seminar Series | Department of Political Science (lu.se)

Jana Krause | University of Oslo

I am Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo and currently Director of the MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies (PECOS). My research focuses on civilian agency and protection in communal conflicts and civil wars, peace processes, climate change and local peacebuilding, and the gender dimensions of peacebuilding.

Over the past fifteen years, I have conducted hundreds of interviews in conflict zones about how civilians protect themselves and build peace locally, including South Sudan, Kenya, Myanmar, as well as Indonesia and Nigeria. I am the author of ‘Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War’ (Cambridge University Press 2018) and co-editor of ‘Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings’ (Oxford University Press 2023). 

My research has won several awards, including the 2019 Lee Ann Fujii Award from the APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Section for my book ‘Resilient Communities‘. I also received the 2020 Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award from the Journal of Peace Research for my article ‘Restrained or Constrained? Election, Communal Conflicts, and Variation in Sexual Violence‘. My work has been funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden, and the European Research Council.

Previously, I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. In 2019/20, I was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Before that, I was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, and at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. I studied political science and international relations at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. I hold a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.