The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2018: Professor Stathis N. Kalyvas

The sixteenth Hugo Valentin Lecture was given by Professor Stathis N. Kalyvas from the University of Oxford on 8 March 2018. Kalyvas is a political scientist and internationally leading scholar in the field of ”civil war studies”, with The Logic of Violence in Civil War as his most important scholarly work.

During the lecture, Kalyvas drew on his earlier civil war research, which explores how violence against civilians is often regarded as a ”natural” extension of the logic of war. The violence against civilians in the context of civil war has also been an eternal source of confusion and fascination, as it often disproportionately affects non-combatants and its practice runs contrary to such basic ties of civil life as common citizenship, neighborhood and community membership, friendships and even family relations. Kalyvas revisited his earlier attempt to make sense of this violence by taking into account recent research and contemporary conflicts.

Stathis N. Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his important research and has been a guest researcher at The European University Institute, The Max Planck Institute, Universidade de São Paulo and The Lingnan University in Hong Kong.