Public Online Colloquium #26: Assoc. Prof. Dr. H. Akın Ünver

On Wednesday, February 3, at 16.00, KHAS Department of International Relations faculty member Assoc. Prof. Dr. H. Akın Ünver will be the guest of the traditional “Open to All Online Colloquium” series. Ünver’s lecture titled “War and Peace: What Can Quantitative Analysis of Conflicts Teach Us About Peace?” will take place online via YouTube and Zoom.

Speech summary:

‘Peace and Conflict Studies’ was formalized in the aftermath of the Second World War and emerged in the 1950s to prevent the world from entering a third (and nuclear) war. In 1959, Johan Galtung, considered the founder of the field, founded the Oslo Peace Research Institute and the Peace Research Association emerged in Sweden, enabling empirical and data-driven analysis of how inter-communal conflicts evolve into war and how peace can be established. During the Cold War period (1947-1991), the field focused mainly on inter-state dynamics, but after 1991, it focused more on the analysis of intra-state conflicts such as civil war, insurgency and radicalization. Today, the field is undergoing an interdisciplinary and methodological transformation, in a sense experiencing its second renaissance. The colloquium will discuss the innovations in the empirical and quantitative analysis of war, the types of data and data sets used in this field, and current methods and debates on how these analyses can help humankind build a more peaceful world. These discussions will also be evaluated in the context of Assoc. Prof. Akın Ünver’s Turkish Academy of Sciences project “Artificial Intelligence and Automation Based Global Armament Database”, and the newly started TÜBİTAK project “Digital Public Diplomacy of Armed Organizations”.