Units, Centres and Research Programmes

Cold War Studies Project

The CWSP focuses on the new history of the Cold War, which uses new primary sources from recently opened archives to challenge conventional understandings, the global Cold War in Europe and Third World - not just the US and USSR, and the continuing modern day impact of the Cold War.

Peace and Security

This project focuses on how peace activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens have imagined and practiced 'peace' and 'security' since the early twentieth century. 

Conflict Research Programme (2016-2021)

The Conflict Research Programme aimed to understand why contemporary violence is so difficult to end and to analyse the underlying political economy of violence with a view to informing policy.

Justice and Security Research Programme (2011-2016)

Generating primary evidence about the informal institutions that govern the lives of people in a range of fragile or war-affected locations. Our focus is on understanding the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘hybrid’ governance structures to find out what arrangements best benefit those at the receiving end of policies to support justice and security.

The Kuwait Programme

The Kuwait Programme is a world-leading hub for research and expertise on Kuwait. The Programme is the main conduit through which research on Kuwait at the School is facilitated, expanded and promoted.

LSE Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme

Through agreement with the Emirates Foundation, the MEC established a funding programme in 2010 to support academic collaboration and knowledge transfer between LSE and Arab universities. The projects involve collaborative research or academic capacity building.

Violence, security, and peace

A group of projects.

Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID)

The Centre for Public Authority and International Development explores how governance works in marginalised and conflict-affected regions. It investigates the complexity of public authority and the risks and opportunities this creates for international development and inclusive growth.

Rockefeller grants (Research projects investigating 'resilience')

Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger.

Human Rights, Human Remains

Human Rights Human Remains advances a pioneering analysis of the ‘forensic turn’ in humanitarianism and human rights. This refers to the application of forensic techniques to the exhumation of mass graves, and to the identification of the deceased victims of atrocities such as enforced disappearance, torture, genocide and war crimes.

Disconnected infrastructures and Violence Against Women (VAW)

Continuous and widespread violence against women in urban India highlights the challenge of delivering the UN's Sustainable Development Goals of Gender Equality and Sustainable Cities and Communities. Combined with this is an acute information and skills gap in technology use amongst urban poor women that impedes their knowledgeable and empowered engagement with urban infrastructures.

Politics of Inequality

The research theme explores the practices of resistance, mobilisation, and contestation which constitute a politics of inequalities from a bottom-up perspective.

Gender, Justice and Security Hub

The Gender, Justice and Security Hub is a multi-partner research network working with local and global civil society, practitioners, governments and international organisations to advance gender justice and inclusive peace.

Tackling Violence against Women and Girls

Beginning February 2016, the Centre has had a central role facilitating and offering advice to two independent UN bodies in relation to their work on violence against women, created a new accessible online resource and supported the campaign for UK ratification of the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.  

Feminist International Law of Peace and Security

The Feminist International Law of Peace and Security seeks to address the conceptual ambiguities and normative indeterminacy that characterise the UN’s Women Peace and Security agenda. This is especially with respect to the key words – ‘women’, ‘peace’ and ‘security’. The project will interrogate these concepts in order to develop the theoretical foundations and normative content of an international law that can more effectively deliver on gender equality and sustainable peace.

Gendered Peace

The Gendered Peace project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 786494). The project seeks to produce a multidisciplinary perspective on a ‘gendered peace’, one that takes into consideration a spectrum of violence in both conflict and peace time. It challenges the accepted orthodoxy of peacebuilding and suggests that taking gender seriously necessitates an alternative paradigm.

Women, Peace and Security: Rethinking Policy, Advocacy and Implementation

In 2000, the UN Security Council made an important commitment to upholding women’s rights in the context of international peace and security with the adoption of resolution 1325. Women and Peace and Security’ now represents a significant and well-established thematic agenda for the Council, and its relevance as an area of political practice extends well beyond the Council Chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Visit here for a full list of past projects.

Rights, Security and Development

Research theme.

Justice, Morality, and the State in Amazonia (JUSTAM)

JUSTAM is a five-year research project that explores how the indigenous peoples of Western Amazonia pursue and enact forms of justice in their everyday lives.

Inequality and Poverty Research Programme

The Inequality and Poverty Research Programme is dedicated to understanding the social relations through which some people are perpetually exploited, marginalized and subordinated, and to illuminating people’s creative and political responses to the conditions in which they find themselves.

Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding (JUSTINT) 

Focused on the four former Yugoslav countries: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia. - The JUSTINT project provides a novel way of analysing how post-conflict justice practices advance or hinder peace-building by studying the interactive and dynamic aspects of discourse.

Conflict Research Group

The Conflict Research Group (CRG) is a multi-disciplinary research and consultancy unit. Its members include leading experts in conflict-related research from five of LSE's academic departments, including Government, International Relations, Sociology, the Methodology Institute, and the European Institute.

Political Behaviour (research group)

The Political Behaviour Group brings together a diverse group of faculty and students from across the LSE to share research on topics related to public opinion, voting and elections, political communication, civic participation, and political psychology.

TransCrisis

TransCrisis, an EU-funded Horizon2020 research project, has brought together experts from across Europe to undertake a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of transboundary crisis in the European Union

Conflict and Identity in Europe since the 18th Century (research cluster)

The cluster "Conflict and Identity" has been set up to provide a place to discuss historical concepts and events that shaped the identity of European countries since the late early modern age. We are interested in questions pertaining to war and peace, nationalism and national identity formation, but also in issues related to transnationalism and internationalism, global entanglements and regional specificities. 

Contemporary International History and the Global Cold War

The group discusses research on the Cold War as a global history of the conflict that took place between 1945 and 1990. The research agenda is far broader than diplomatic, military, and intelligence histories of the conflict.

Security and Statecraft (research cluster)

This research cluster explores statecraft: the foreign policies and strategies of states and non-state actors; the wars and conflicts that sometimes result; and diplomacy and security relations.

Latin America and Myanmar Programme

Justice Equity and Technology Project

Exploring the impact of new technologies on questions of social, racial, and economic justice.

Gypsy and Traveller Experiences of Crime and Justice Since the 1960s: A Mixed Methods Study

The aim of this multi-disciplinary, mixed methods study led by Professor Coretta Phillips is to provide the first systematic, comprehensive and historically grounded account of the crime and criminal justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in in two urban and two rural areas of England since the 1960s. 

The Foreign Policy of Counter Secession Project

Drawing on the cases of Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, this project examines the structural factors that shape recognition and explores the specific diplomatic, political and legal tools states have at their disposal to try to prevent recognition.

The Politics of Enlargement: The EU and South East Europe

This project sought to question the essentially normative basis/assumption of the impetus behind the enlargement process by focussing on South East Europe.

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Theory Forum

The aim of the Forum is to provide a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue on the criminal law and the criminal justice system. Its members and affiliates (mainly from LSE Law School but also other LSE Departments and institutions) conduct research on various aspects of criminal law and criminal justice from a variety of methodological standpoints.