Description:

Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as they host Stathis Kalyvas, professor of government at the University of Oxford and a University Academic Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford for a talk titled "Violent Political Conflict."

We currently study violent political conflict in a way that is imprecise, unstructured, and fragmented, across siloed subfields that have emerged along arbitrary dimensions. This situation undermines the validity and cumulation of our findings. I offer a simple set that produces the minimum number of distinct, theoretically derived, clearly delineated categories covering the maximum range of violent political conflict—essentially a reconceptualization that improves the precision and validity of our categories and findings and allows their integration. New questions and research agendas emerge alongside a vocabulary allowing us to describe highly complex phenomena. 

Stathis N. Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government and fellow of All Souls College at Oxford. Until 2018 he was Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he founded and directed the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence and co-directed the Hellenic Studies Program. In 2019 he founded and directs the T. E. Lawrence Program on Conflict and Violence at All Souls College. Kalyvas obtained his BA from the University of Athens (1986) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1993), all in political science. He taught at Ohio State University (1993-94), New York University (1994-2000), the University of Chicago (2000-03), Yale University (2003-2017) before joining Oxford in 2018. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Sciences Po-Paris, Oxford, the University of São Paulo, Lingnan University of Hong Kong, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the University of Witten/Herdecke, the Juan March Institute, the Max Planck Institute, and the European University Institute.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as part of their Sovereignties Dialogue, a year-long conversation mobilizing humanities research to question, understand, and reimagine sovereignties—bodily, artistic, intellectual, geopolitical.