Blog Posts
Posted by Inger Skjelsbæk, Johanne Rokke Elvebakken, Lina Stotz & Ingvill C. Ødegaard on Thursday, 23 February 2023
Over nine months have passed since Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Several of the first Ukrainian women who became pregnant as a result of wartime sexual violence have now given birth to children who were conceived as a result of this violence. More will be born in the coming months. And ... Read more »
Today Save the Children launches its new report Stop the War on Children: The Forgotten Ones. The report is based on PRIO’s sixth annual mapping of children in armed conflict covering the period 1990-2021. In 2021 our estimates suggest that 449 million children, or more than 1 out of 6 ... Read more »
Posted by Lina Stotz, Johanne Rokke Elvebakken, Ingvill Constanze Mochmann, Inger Skjelsbæk, Sunniva Árja Tobiasen & Torunn L. Tryggestad on Sunday, 6 March 2022
A recent UN report published by the Secretary General in late January is one of the first to focus exclusively on women and girls who become pregnant as a result of sexual violence in conflict and on children born of war. The term ‘children born of war’ refers to children born ... Read more »
The recruitment and use of children as soldiers is one of the United Nations Security Council’s ‘six grave violations’ against children in times of war, as well as one of the most significant consequences of armed conflict in terms of children’s wellbeing. On 30 November, Save the Children launched its ... Read more »
On Friday October 30, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on the protection of education in conflict zones. This is one of the most important matters on which Norway has facilitated negotiations in the Security Council and the resolution is a major step in the right direction for protecting ... Read more »
Posted by Kristian Berg Harpviken & Bjørn Schirmer-Nilsen on Friday, 6 August 2021
The plight of Syrian refugees is worsening day by day. They face increasing pressure in all of the primary host countries. The route to a safe haven in Europe is closed. Returning to a Syria in ruins, where the conflict remains unresolved, is seen by most refugees as far too ... Read more »
Posted by Amalie Nilsen on Wednesday, 4 August 2021
In 2019, millions of Hong Kong citizens took to the streets to protest a proposed bill that would allow Hong Kong authorities to extradite suspected criminals to mainland China. The protests soon developed into a movement, demanding full universal suffrage, amnesty of arrested protestors, and an independent inquiry to investigate police brutality. Known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) ... Read more »
Posted by Júlia Palik on Tuesday, 27 April 2021
Yemen’s conflict has been described as a forgotten war. Peace, up until recently, has been even more forgotten. The new US administration has begun a new a military and diplomatic track to end the fighting. Biden has made Yemen one of his foreign policy priorities, selected veteran diplomat Timothy Lenderking ... Read more »
Posted by Andra MongMao on Thursday, 15 April 2021
Resistance to the 1 February, 2021 military coup in Myanmar is symbolised by a recent video: Images of young protesters killed by Myanmar’s Security Forces are accompanied by lyrics: “We are ghosts. We are already dead. If we die again today, in this life and the next, we will haunt ... Read more »
Posted by Klo Kwe Moo Kham on Wednesday, 10 March 2021
The February 1st military coup in Myanmar and the massive demonstrations that followed have deservedly gained the world’s attention. The people of Myanmar have had their taste of democracy, however fragile it was, and now refuse to let go of it. But what about peace in Myanmar? Myanmar’s Peace Process ... Read more »
Posted by Stein Tønnesson on Wednesday, 3 March 2021
The coup d’état in Myanmar marks a defeat for the military’s attempt to create a “discipline-flourishing” democracy. The coup occurred on 1 February, just before the newly elected parliament was set to convene. This timing made it easy to arrest the country’s leading politicians. The military used allegations of electoral ... Read more »
A staggering 72 million children—17% of the 426 million children living in conflict areas globally, or 1 in 6—are living near armed groups that have been reported to perpetrate sexual violence against children. That means 3% of all children in the world are living at risk for sexual violence in ... Read more »
Posted by Bintu Zahara Sakor & Vamo Soko on Tuesday, 24 November 2020
In the past weeks, the Nigerian city of Lagos had been rocked by numerous youth-led protests against police brutality by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, also known as SARS. These protests which started peacefully turned deadly with numerous reports accusing the Nigerian police officers of shooting the demonstrators, resulting in at ... Read more »
Posted by Ebba Tellander on Monday, 23 November 2020
We can all learn and draw inspiration from stories of ordinary people who care for others and resist oppression while risking their own lives. Such stories are often overlooked in both the media and in much research on conflict zones. In Somaliland in the early 1980s, doctors and teachers and ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Nilsen & Benjamin Dix on Monday, 16 November 2020
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy secured yet another large majority in the Myanmar parliament in the national election. But, despite the Nobel peace laureate’s party being in power since 2015, progress in the war-torn and troubled country remains hampered by both structural restraints and the absence of political ... Read more »
The Norwegian Nobel Committee named this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, recognizing the World Food Program (WFP) for “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and ... Read more »
Posted by PRIO on Monday, 12 October 2020
Introduction For over six decades, our mission here at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) has been to produce research for a more peaceful world. We analyze the conditions, causes, and dynamics of the political and social processes that create conflict or peace, and communicate this knowledge to policymakers, stakeholders, ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Thursday, 1 October 2020
A full-blown war erupted in the South Caucasus last Sunday, September 27, and the two belligerents – Armenia and Azerbaijan – are proceeding with mobilizations under martial law, but no international authority tries in earnest to stop the hostilities. The conflict over Nagorno Karabakh ignited 30 years ago as the ... Read more »
Posted by Aida Ibričević on Tuesday, 25 August 2020
Entirely unprepared for what I was about to experience, I walked through the thick, dark curtain leading up to the main hallway of the War Childhood Museum. I had stepped into a different realm, one of physical objects telling stories of growing up in wartime. Each had a voice, some whispering and ... Read more »
Posted by Adrian Arellano on Monday, 13 July 2020
On September 29, 1919, in Phillips County, Arkansas, a deputy died while trying to break up a labor meeting of black farmers. The next day rumors swirled about an impending black insurrection. In response, a white mob of up to 1,000 strong formed and indiscriminately attacked blacks across the county ... Read more »
People around the world are grappling to understand events in the United States at the moment regarding the current wave of protest and protest policing. A few events readily come to mind in this comparison but the one that probably carries the greatest resonance would be the uprisings/disturbances/riots that followed ... Read more »
Posted by Kiela Crabtree on Friday, 12 June 2020
Protests in the United States, and around the world, have drawn attention to state-sponsored violence against black people in particular and people of color in general. As Black Lives Matter protests continue, the names of the many people, whose deaths sparked this collective outrage, ring out. Social media posts tag ... Read more »
Posted by Tora Sagård on Monday, 9 March 2020
How does a country’s security apparatus react to a protest movement? And what happens in the aftermath of successful protests? PRIO is conducting three major research projects about protest movements, securing its position as an international leader in this field. In 2019, the world experienced a surge of non-violent protest ... Read more »
Inequality fosters violent conflict, which again causes inequality, triggering a vicious cycle. In December the UN Development Programme (UNDP) released its annual ‘Human Development Report’. For 2019 the report focused on inequality. The report is being launched as nightly news is dominated by pictures of protests in countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Chile and Hong Kong. These ... Read more »
Posted by Bintu Zahara Sakor, Marianne Dahl, Haakon Gjerløw & Tora Sagård on Tuesday, 7 January 2020
The year 2019 ended with a new wave of non-violent protests. In every corner of the world there have been huge movements gathering. This marks the end of a decade that opened with the Arab Spring; a decade that might go down in history as the decade of mass protests. ... Read more »
Posted by Erica Chenoweth, Sirianne Dahlum, Sooyeon Kang, Zoe Marks, Christopher Wiley Shay & Tore Wig on Monday, 25 November 2019
Around the globe, mass nonviolent protests are demanding that national leaders step down. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s three-term leftist president, is the latest casualty of mass demonstrations, after being abandoned by the military. Beyond Bolivia, people are rising up against their governments in places as varied as Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador, Argentina, Hong Kong, Iraq and Britain. This ... Read more »
Posted by Natalie M. Dyvesether on Monday, 4 November 2019
This year’s telethon in Norway, an annual event, raised over 225 million Norwegian kroner for CARE’s work in strengthening women’s rights. Gender equality and women’s empowerment aren’t just goals in themselves: achieving those goals will reduce poverty and lower the risk of armed conflict. Every day 830 women die due ... Read more »
Posted by Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen & Tore Wig on Tuesday, 29 October 2019
The success of mass protests depends on who is doing the protesting. Many observers fear that democracy is currently at risk — including in the United States and some European countries. Some commentators blame less-educated members of the working classes for the democratic backlash. According to the stereotype, these voters tend ... Read more »
Posted by Kendra Dupuy on Monday, 9 September 2019
In recent years, dozens of countries around the world have been closing civil society space, clamping down on the ability of civil society organizations (CSOs) to operate freely. Alarmingly, this trend is taking place not only in countries with autocratic governments, but also in democratic countries. How are CSOs being ... Read more »
Posted by Kiela Crabtree on Tuesday, 13 August 2019
An August 3, 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas highlights the continuing presence of racially-motivated violence in the United States. The shooter expressed white nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments in a manifesto written prior to the attack, and the American news media has begun to frame the attack as one ... Read more »
Hundreds of Mozambicans were killed and thousands made homeless recently by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Almost immediately, there were reports of a sadly familiar story: women being forced to trade sex for food by local community leaders distributing aid. Globally, international organisations appear to be grappling with the issue more seriously than before. Yet reports about ... Read more »
Posted by Indra de Soysa on Thursday, 25 April 2019
The terrorist attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday have spawned many questions about the return of violence to Sri Lanka after a 10-year hiatus following the defeat of the Tamil Tiger (LTTE) terrorists in May 2009. The first thing to understand is that the terror ... Read more »
Posted by Julie Ræstad Owe on Monday, 25 February 2019
The media has yet again turned its attention toward the women of ISIS. Currently ISIS only occupies one square kilometre of the so-called caliphate they once had, and as the final battles to regain former ISIS-controlled territory are unfolding, more and more ISIS fighters’ wives or widows have ended up ... Read more »
The negotiations between the United States and the Taliban may represent the most important turning point in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led intervention. But the path to an internal Afghan peace process is difficult, and only history will tell whether these negotiations marked the onset of a sustainable Afghan peace ... Read more »
Posted by Helge Hveem on Monday, 14 January 2019
On 10 December, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nadia Murad and to Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecologist. For 10 years though, the Norwegian media and politicians, including the prime minister, have viewed the Democratic Republic of the Congo as Joshua French’s prison.* This view derives from a chauvinistic ... Read more »
Are there any similarities between the bloody war in Game of Thrones (GoT) and modern conflicts? The battle fields are certainly quite different, and dragons have very little to do with today’s conflicts (although they may allude to weapons of mass destruction). However, if we look beyond the fighting and ... Read more »
This year, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to the Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and the Iraqi human rights activist, and witness and survivor of human-trafficking, Nadia Murad. These two voices are an extremely important contribution to ongoing efforts to combat war-related sexual violence. We are among the ... Read more »
Posted by Júlia Palik on Friday, 7 December 2018
This week the spotlight is on Sweden and UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths: On Wednesday representatives of the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels arrived in Stockholm to find solutions to what the UN described as the ‘worst [humanitarian] crisis in the world’. The Saudi Arabia-led nine-member coalition has been at ... Read more »
Posted by Jacqui True & Sara Davies on Wednesday, 5 December 2018
#HearMeToo is the theme of this year’s 16 days of activism to end violence against women. Responding to this catch-cry, as researchers, there is much we can do to link analysis to a theory of change. Reports of sexual and gender-based violence can deliver protection to victims. But there is ... Read more »
Posted by Julie Marie Hansen on Monday, 12 November 2018
Facebook has been making headlines this year with what seems like scandal after scandal, from the Cambridge Analytica data breach to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the United States Congress as a result. But perhaps one of the most serious scandals has been the social media platform’s ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Liliana Lyra Jubilut & Adèle Garnier on Monday, 29 October 2018
This fall, the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) was held in New York. The 193 UN member states gather annually to discuss, and sometimes act upon, global issues. Refugees were on the agenda in 2018, not only because numbers are historically high (25.4 million at the end ... Read more »
Posted by Ragnhild Nordås & Elisabeth Jean Wood on Monday, 15 October 2018
As Islamic State forces swept through northern Iraq in 2014, they captured the city of Mosul and then attacked the nearby Yazidi people. Thousands of Yazidis were executed — and some 3,000 girls and women were kidnapped. Most were sexually enslaved. One of the two recipients of this year’s Nobel ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Friday, 28 September 2018
In 2017, Latin America was described by the UN as the world’s most violent continent for women. The assassinations of women activists and community leaders have continued across the region in 2018. While the killing of Marielle Franco, a favela community leader, and the unraveling of government-private enterprise collusion in ... Read more »
The Norwegian government must have known that the 2011 bombing campaign in Libya could lead to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, argues PRIO researcher Kristian Berg Harpviken. In light of the recent release of the commission’s official report on Norway’s participation in the military operation in Libya, Harpviken was asked ... Read more »
Posted by Kalle Moene on Wednesday, 12 October 2016
The FARC and the Colombian government deserved to share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, however, the prize was awarded to only one party. In general we are idiots if we let political correctness govern our views about how the world works. We confuse facts with latent sympathies – a ... Read more »
The Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasizes that the award of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize to the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is not only a prize given in recognition of his own personal efforts to end the more than 50 year old civil war in the country, but that this ... Read more »
Posted by Catalina Vallejo & Diego Marín on Thursday, 6 October 2016
In its current state, the Colombian peace process not only deserves but could in fact highly benefit from the symbolic effects that go hand in hand with being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Recently, in a tight vote, Colombians said ‘No’ to supporting the peace agreement between the government and ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal & Martin Tegnander on Tuesday, 4 October 2016
In the long dark night that is the Syrian nightmare, the White Helmets have become the only ray of light. In an earlier PRIO blog post, Erica Chenoweth observed that “there are really two types of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates – elites (or elite-led institutions) and ordinary people.” This year, ... Read more »
Posted by Ragnhild Nordås on Friday, 8 April 2016
Is it just religious fanatics who blow themselves up as suicide bombers? Bernt Hagtvet, Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, has been active in the Norwegian media lately, stating that only religion (he focuses mostly on Islam) brings the fervor to commit suicide attacks as part of ... Read more »
Posted by Gudrun Østby on Thursday, 3 December 2015
I have just returned from two weeks in Congo. PRIO colleagues Ragnhild Nordås, Siri Aas Rustad and I held project meetings with our local partner. Most of our time in Congo, however, was spent teaching how to conduct research. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is often described as one ... Read more »
More aid workers are being targeted in violent attacks than ever before, but the roots of humanitarian insecurity have nuanced and surprising causes. Syria. Afghanistan. Mali. Central African Republic. Today’s complex conflicts seem to be defined by insurgents, terrorist groups and other violent actors with ideologies that increasingly disregard the ... Read more »
Last year the Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several years in a row, frequently hailed among the favorites. Tomorrow the winner of the prize for 2015 will be announced. We think ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Kjersti Lohne on Thursday, 13 August 2015
Earlier this spring, we debated a law professor who insisted that lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) could clean up war. The professor posited that a war fought with autonomous weapons would be a war without rape. Taking humans out of the loop would, the argument goes, lead to more humane war. ... Read more »
Posted by Erica Chenoweth on Monday, 29 June 2015
In his article in the May 2015 issue of APSR, Evgeny Finkel makes a splash by arguing that exposure to “selective repression” (such as surveillance, beatings, arrests, and torture) helps dissidents to develop a robust skill set with which to maintain enduring resistance later on. He supports this argument with ... Read more »
Posted by Nic Marsh on Thursday, 21 May 2015
PRIO is a partner in a new global homicide monitor that has just been published. Hosted by the Igarapé Institute in Brazil, the monitor presents counts and estimates of global homicide over the period 2000-2014 and is intended to provoke reflection and stimulate debate. The Monitor reports 437,000 homicides in 2012, the ... Read more »
Posted by Rebecca Bryant on Monday, 18 May 2015
Northern Cyprus held the second round of its presidential election on 26 April, with Mustafa Akıncı defeating the incumbent President, Derviş Eroğlu. Rebecca Bryant writes on what the result of the election might mean for the people of northern Cyprus and future negotiations with the Greek Cypriot-controlled Republic of Cyprus. She notes ... Read more »
Posted by Erica Chenoweth on Tuesday, 17 February 2015
Since at least 2011, the Chinese government has censored numerous websites on the topic of nonviolent resistance, including websites for the Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an online bibliography of scholarship of nonviolent action, and the website for the NAVCO data project, among others. A month ... Read more »
Posted by Christian Davenport on Wednesday, 27 August 2014
How does the police react to situations when protestors are of one ethnicity as opposed to another? In a Washington Post/Monkey Cage blog entitled “Who Protests Determines How Police Respond,” this question is discussed referencing an earlier article of mine with Sarah Soule and David Armstrong entitled “Protesting While Black?” ... Read more »
Posted by Ragnhild Nordås on Tuesday, 10 June 2014
Later this week, ministers from more than 140 countries, along with an estimated 1,500 invited delegates, are gathering in London for the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. The summit — the largest gathering of its type — is co-chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and the ... Read more »
Posted by Christian Davenport on Thursday, 8 May 2014
Discussion about who killed Anna Mae Aquash of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s raises some interesting thoughts regarding what takes place when governments and challengers square off against one another. Underlying most research on the topic and popular understanding is the idea that governments and challengers represent different ... Read more »
Posted by Christian Davenport on Thursday, 17 April 2014
Fourteen years ago I began a journey to understand the political violence that took place in Rwanda during the year of 1994. Toward this end, I brought with me the skills that I had at that time: 1) an interest in media as well as government-generated data and content analysis, ... Read more »
Posted by Maral Mirshahi on Tuesday, 1 April 2014
In January 2014 PRIO researchers Gudrun Østby and Ragnhild Nordås went on a two-week fieldtrip to Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, DRC. The main purpose of the visit was to launch the new collaborative project, “Female Empowerment in Eastern DRC”, funded by the Research Council of Norway. This project ... Read more »
Posted by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch & Idean Salehyan on Tuesday, 11 February 2014
The Syrian refugee crisis has been heartbreaking to watch. According to the United Nations, over 2.4 million people have fled the country, and many more have been displaced internally. This human tragedy has shocked the world’s conscience and has led for appeals for humanitarian relief. However, does the influx of ... Read more »