The Transformation of Violence and the Rise of the Stabilization Agenda

Location

Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, E/F

Free

Please join us for a brown bag discussion with Kroc School Peace Scholar, Dr. Robert Muggah. The topic for discussion will be the transformation of violence and the rise of the stabilization agenda.

No RSVP is required.

There is mounting evidence that collective violence has undergone a profound transformation during the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. While fluctuating, the overall frequency and intensity of armed conflicts has steadily declined since the 1950s. Likewise, national rates of non-conflict violence have declined in most parts of the world over the same period.

Although all societies are affected by various types of violence, some are more impacted than others. International diplomatic, defence and development actors are aware of these shifts, and adapting their discourse, policies and practices accordingly. A new lexicon has emerged, including open-ended concepts such as fragility, stabilization and reconstruction.

Robert Muggah will discuss some of the latest trends in research on conflict and non-conflict violence. Drawing from the Global Burden of Armed Violence, he will highlight global and regional tendencies. He will also signal some emerging ways that governments are seeking to prevent and reverse such violence. He will feature some examples from his latest violume on stabilization operations, showing how these have extended well beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to the Americas, Africa and Asia.

Robert MUGGAH is Research Director of the Igarapé Institute, a Principal of the SecDev Group, and associated with the Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. From Brazil he directs several projects on international cooperation, peace-support operations, transnational organized crime, citizen security and violence reduction, and humanitarian action in non-war settings across Latin America and the Caribbean. Previously, Dr. Muggah was Research Director and Researcher at the Small Arms Survey (2000-2011), a lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies, and an adviser to bilateral and multilateral agencies. He is an editor and/or author of Stabilization Operations, Security and Development (New York: Routledge, 2013), The Global Burden of Armed Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Security and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (London: Routledge), Relocation Failures in Sri Lanka (Zed Books, 2009) and No Refuge (London: Zed Books, 2006). Dr. Muggah received his DPhil at Oxford university and his MPhil at the Institute for Development Studies (Ids), University of Sussex.