Corinne Bara

Corinne Bara is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research in Uppsala. Her research focuses on the dynamics of violence and strategies of armed actors during and after civil wars. She currently leads two projects: one on conflict zones and the location of violence during and after civil wars; the other on ceasefires and how they shape the dynamics of violence in armed conflicts. Corinne received her PhD from ETH Zürich in 2016.

More information: www.corinnebara.net

Corinne Bara is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research in Uppsala. She currently leads two projects: one on conflict zones and the location of violence during and after civil wars; the other on ceasefires and how they shape the dynamics of violence in armed conflicts.

Originally from Switzerland, Corinne Bara received her PhD from ETH Zürich in late 2016. She came to Sweden on a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Lisa Hultman’s project Ending Atrocities: Third Party Interventions into Civil Wars, she studied the impact on peace operations on postwar violence.

Her publications have appeared in the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR), International Peacekeeping (IPK), the Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR), and the Journal of Peace Research (JPR). For the JCR publication, she received the NEPS Medal for best publication in peace science in 2019; for the JPR publication she received the Nils Petter Gleditsch JPR Article of the Year award in 2014.

Prior to embarking on her dissertation research, she worked for the human security division of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and was a researcher at the Center for Security Studies (ETH Zürich), where she specialized in research and consultancy (for the Swiss government) on risk analysis and disaster management.

Corinne Bara's research focuses on armed conflict within states, with a particular focus on how violence transforms in response to changes in actors’ strategic environment both during war and in the postwar period. Such changes could stem, for instance, from external interventions in the form of peacekeeping, or from milestones in peace processes, such as ceasefires. To capture relevant shifts in violence, she looks at a wide range of armed actors beyond the main combatants, such as militia groups, private military and security companies, mercenaries, and communal groups. Her work is primarily quantitative-comparative and aims to disentangle the spatial and temporal dynamics of violence: When and where exactly does violence escalate or shift, and what does this tell us about actors’ motivations and constraints?