Emma Elfversson

Short presentation

I am Associate Professor (Docent) and work on issues spanning development studies, comparative politics and peace research. I currently lead two large research projects exploring why evictions turn violent and the continuation of conflict-related violence in postwar cities. Other current research investigates civil society-police interactions in Sweden and Kenya, Swedish police education, land rights and climate resilience strategies (Kenya), and the social networks of urban mediators (Liberia).

Keywords

• conflict research
• conflict resolution
• mediation
• communal conflict
• kenya
• africa
• urban violence
• development studies
• sustainable development
• indigeneity ethnicity and nationalism
• comparative politics
• urban governance
• community policing
• ethnic politics
• evictions

Biography

I am Associate Professor (Docent) in peace and conflict research, and hold a Ph.D. (2017) and a Politices Magister degree (2008) from Uppsala University. My doctoral thesis, Central Politics and Local Peacemaking: The Conditions for Peace after Communal Conflict (2017) is available here. Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I worked for two years as a research assistant with the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP).

Teaching

I teach on several thematic courses in Peace and Conflict Studies, as well as Research Methods (qual and quant) at MSSc and PhD level. I have extensive experience as as thesis supervisor at Bachelor and MSSc level. I am assistant supervisor to PhD candidates Marcellina Priadi and Lisa Svenhard. I have previously taught courses such as International Conflict Resolution, Politics of Development, and Reviewing a Research Field at the departments of peace and conflict research and political science.

Service to the profession

I currently serve as Director of the Swedish Development Research Network (SweDev). I have held a number of other positions of trust at Uppsala University, including vice chairperson in the Student Union's Doctoral Board; the presidium of the Academic Senate; chairperson of the PhD council at the faculty of social sciences; a member of the social sciences faculty board; teacher representative to the board at DPCR; and a member of the Martin H:son Holmdahl scholarship committee.

Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of peace and conflict research, development studies, and comparative politics. More specifically, my ongoing and recent research concerns ethnic politics and communal violence, local conflict resolution, community policing, land rights, and urban violence. I am currently conducting research within several collaborative projects:

• Why evictions turn violent: The politics of growing cities (PI, the project page is found here). The project leveragres comparative study of cities in Sub-Saharan Africa and in-depth quantitative and qualitative research in Ethiopia and Kenya to understand how and why forced evictions turn violent, and provide broader insights into how urban development shapes political control, violence, and community resistance in rapidly growing cities.
• The continuation of conflict-related violence in postwar cities: Mapping violence at the street level (PI, the project page is found here). This project collects systematic, microlevel data on conflict-related violence in postwar cities, and uses this novel data to advance theoretical and empirical knowledge on patterns and causes of urban postwar violence. To complement quantitative analysis and assess theoretical mechanisms at more depth, we conduct fieldwork in the postwar cities Beirut, Belfast, Mitrovica and Abidjan.
• Conflict or Cooperation? Civil society, the police and crime prevention in vulnerable areas (project page). The project analyses varying levels of conflict and cooperation in police-civil society relations, exploring the form that police-civil society relations take, the public positioning of civil society actors vis-à-vis police, and the motivations of civil society actors in cooperating or not. It focuses on strategically selected areas marked by socioeconomic marginalisation and insecurity in two Swedish medium-sized cities, using in-depth and comparative case studies.
• Strategies of climate resilience: Examining the role of land tenure. This EBA-funded project seeks to increase the understanding of how tenure security shapes resilience strategies, by paying attention to individual- and community-level perceptions and strategies. Combining novel survey and interview data from Kenya, we assess how formal and perceived tenure security affect the different individual and collective strategies people use to decrease their vulnerability to climate change. Our EBA report is available here.
• Communities at risk: Mediation as a tool to defuse ethnic tensions in postwar Liberia and beyond. This project, funded by FBA, investigates why some mediators are more popular than others, when it comes to settling inter-ethnic personal disputes. We suggest that most residents prefer to take their inter-ethnic disputes to societal brokers–individuals who possess networks that transcend ethnic cleavages–for arbitration. Empirically, we study the small city Voinjama in postwar Liberia, using social network analysis and ethnographic fieldwork.

More broadly, my research has sought to investigate how processes of urbanization affects electoral and communal violence in cities, and political conditions for local conflict resolution. My doctoral research project analyzed the durable resolution of communal conflict, and the role of the state and non-state actors in resolving such conflicts, focusing on cases in Africa. I investigated the dynamics between local conflict resolution processes and central government strategies, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. The introduction to the thesis (kappa) is available here. Much of my work on communal conflict is summed up in this short article for The Conversation Africa.

Replication data for quantitative research outputs available at: https://github.com/emmaelfversson