This 2018 Doctoral Workshop of the Development Economics Committee of the German Economic Association (Entwicklungsökonomischer Ausschuss – Verein für Socialpolitik) will be organized by Prof. Tilman Brück at ISDC – International Security and Development Center in Berlin. The workshop will take place on 6 and 7 September 2018.
The aims of the Doctoral Workshop 2018 are:
The two-day seminar will be conducted entirely in English.
ISDC – International Security and Development Center, the Institute of Development Studies (UK) and the Households in Conflict Network will host an international research workshop in Berlin, Germany, on 20-21 September 2018 on the micro-level analysis of centrifugal societies. We invite submissions of complete papers or extended abstracts in any relevant discipline by 20 June 2018.
The background to this workshop is the observation that across Europe and beyond, economies, societies and nation states appear to have started falling apart, with authoritarian governments and heads of state coming in power from the United States, Russia, China and the Philippines, secessionist movements growing in Scotland and Catalonia, parts of Ukraine being occupied, anti-European governments being elected in the UK, Hungary and Poland, and an unprecedented rise of far-right parties across democratic Europe, including in France, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.
Parts of the European and indeed global social contract are being questioned, with extreme consequences for how societies organise and govern themselves and with impacts on the behaviour and well-being of citizens around the world. Drivers may be universal phenomena like globalisation, technological change and inequality – but these clearly differ by institutional and local context and their impacts are felt differently across heterogeneous groups and individuals.
Institute of Public Policy and Administration of the University of Central Asia (UCA), Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), and International Security and Development Center (ISDC), are pleased to announce the next fourth annual ‘Life in Kyrgyzstan’ Conference to take place in Bishkek on 17-18 October 2018.
The two-day conference will bring together national and international experts from government and the public sector, development agencies, non-governmental organizations, academia and research institutions, and media to exchange knowledge and experiences on recent socio-economic developments in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia, and to promote evidence-based policy making.
Tilman Brück was a speaker at the 2017 International Conference on Social Protection in Contexts of Fragility and Forced Displacement that took place on 28-29 September 2017 in Brussels. His contribution was included in the session on “Thinking Long (er) Term in Fragile Contexts”.
The objective of the conference was to shed new light on the prospects of using social protection systems in context of fragility and forced displacement, with the overall aim to better operationalize international commitments. The international conference brought together over 220 participants from governments, international and bilateral organisations, civil society and research institutes from 40 countries to discuss concrete and technical implementation of the international commitments. The report of the session and the complete conference report can be found here.
ISDC researchers provided training at the first “Measuring Violent Conflict in Household Surveys” workshop, held on 19-23 March in Perugia, Italy, as part of a workshop series organised by the World Bank. The participants included staff from National Statistical Offices (NSOs) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The instructors included staff from the World Bank, the International Security and Development Center, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The workshop was developed in response to the needs of NSOs for information on how conflict, in their own and in neighboring countries, is affecting the well-being of households. The workshop included sessions on (i) the Conflict Exposure Module – a generic household survey module that captures the multifaceted individual- and household-level effects of violent conflict; (ii) data collection among Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees; and (iii) where to find and how to use other conflict event data such as the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, among other topics. The workshop will be held again in September and November 2018.
Tilman Brück is a speaker in the webinar on Social Protection in Fragile Contexts, hosted by UNICEF’s Office of Research – Innocenti on 8 November 2017.
One of the key commitments under the Grand Bargain revolves around increasing social protection programmes as mechanisms for humanitarian action, including with a specific commitment on building evidence on their benefits and impacts. Drawing on established research under the ‘Transfer Project’ and from recent initiatives in fragile and displacement contexts, UNICEF’s Office of Research – Innocenti will be hosting an online event to contribute findings and lessons as part Humanitarian Evidence Week 2017. Bringing together in-house experts, field practitioners, and researchers from academia, the discussion will present recent efforts and findings from conducting impact evaluations of social protection programmes in emergencies, discuss research designs, and share lessons from challenges and opportunities to scale-up research efforts and contribute in building the body of evidence on social protection in fragile contexts.
Tilman Brück will give a keynote speech at a Crisis Talk on “Humanitarian Crises: Roles, Responsibilities and Risks for Europe”. The event will take place on 17 October 2017 at the Representation of the State of Hessen to the EU in Brussels.
Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) cordially invites applications for participation as an expert and supervisor in the computational social science (CSS) summer school on data-driven modeling of conflict to take place at Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) from 23 July to 3 August 2018. The summer school will serve as a research incubator aimed at fostering the use of computational methods in the social sciences and developing a topical contribution to the field.
The workshop will take place on 27 September 2017 at 10:30 – 12:30 at the Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law headquarters in the Hague. It will start with an introduction of the project followed by a discussion on the context in which the migration process has taken place. We will deliver midterm findings of a case-study focussing on mixed migration from a range of MENA countries into the EU28.
Continue reading
A workshop on the Drivers of Mixed Migration from the MENA Region will be held on 20 July in Tunis. This workshop is the inception event of the project “Drivers of Mixed Migration: Analysing the Role of Development and Security Policies in the MENA Region”. It is a six-month research and policy programme funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and led by ISDC. The project brings together a group of leading researchers, practitioners and policymakers with significant experience in the MENA region. The consortium includes the following partners: International Development and Security Center (ISDC); United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA); Spark; and the United Nations University – Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT).
Wolfgang Stojetz has successfully completed a highly rigorous international selection process to participate in the 6th Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences together with Laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The meeting will take place on 22-26 August, 2017 in Lindau, Germany. This annual meeting brings together about 30 Nobel Laureates and the next generation of leading scientists: undergraduates, PhD students, and post-doc researchers from all over the world. The aim of the meeting is to foster the exchange among scientists of different generations, cultures, and disciplines.
Wolfgang Stojetz is a Research Affiliate at ISDC working on the economic, social and institutional interactions of development and violent mass conflict.
Tilman Brück will chair the Launch of Global Peace Index 2017 which will take place on Monday, 26 June 2017 at Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. In the 2017 Global Peace Index, Germany maintains its traditional top spot as the 6th most peaceful and peace-supporting country globally. In the middle of an election campaign that is partly fought over whether or not to double military spending in less than a decade to meet NATO’s 2% goal, the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) and the International Security and Development Center (ISDC) are very pleased to invite you for a presentation and discussion of this year’s Global Peace Index.
A workshop on ‘Employment for Stability’ will be held in The Hague on 14 June 2017 from 10.00 – 12.00 to present and discuss findings of the research project “Does Opportunity Reduce Instability? A Meta-Analysis of Skills and Employment Interventions in LMICs”. The multi-year research project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and led by The Hague Institute for Global Justice. The project brings together a large set of leading researchers working on stability and employment in development from a range of European and African institutions.
The seminar will take place on 11 May 2017 at The World Bank in Washington DC. It will explore recent research findings on household labor behavior and labor markets developments using evidence from the Life in Kyrgyzstan Study – a unique, multi-topic longitudinal survey of 3000 households in the Kyrgyz Republic conducted between 2010 and 2016.
The workshop, co-hosted by World Bank GSURR/social development, CDD Global Solutions Group, Aga Khan Foundation and the State and Peace-building Fund (SPF), will take place on 10 May 2017.
The Kyrgyz Republic’s ‘Social Cohesion Through Community Based Approaches (SoCo)” Project, financed by the World Bank’s State- and Peace-Building Trust Fund and the Aga Khan Foundation, was launched in 2013, with the objective of identifying, piloting and building capacity for social cohesion mechanisms in CDD interventions.
Tilman Brück and Damir Esenaliev of ISDC will present at a workshop on Social Cohesion in Kyrgyzstan organised by the Central Asia Program of George Washington University on 10 May 2017. Social cohesion has emerged over the last two decades as an important concept in both academic and political discourse, especially in fragile and conflict-affected environments. At the same time, the evidence on how to build social cohesion and peace at the individual level has been quite scarce. This event will review some exciting new evidence on building peace and social cohesion at the micro-level from Central Asia.
ISDC is co-organising a Seminar on Agricultural Transformation in Central Asia in collaboration with IFPRI’s Central Asia Program, the University of Central Asia and SIPRI. The seminar will take place at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, USA on 9 May 2017. Papers presented in the seminar provide evidence on kidney beans and sheep meat value chains development; contractual arrangements, food safety compliance, and challenges in the dairy supply chain; welfare effects of smallholder export participation; and effects of income shocks on employment and migration in Kyrgyzstan. The authors use diverse sources of household survey data, including the Life in Kyrgyzstan Survey, the Kyrgyzstan Integrated Household Survey, the Dairy Value Chain Survey, etc.
Academic Organizers: Tilman Brück (IGZ/ISDC), Patricia Justino (IDS), Philip Verwimp (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Marco d’Errico (FAO)Institute of Public Policy and Administration of the University of Central Asia (UCA), Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Security and Development Center (ISDC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are pleased to announce the second annual ‘Life in Kyrgyzstan’ Conference to take place in Bishkek on 6-7October 2016.
The International Labour Organization (ILO), the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank (WB) have teamed up for an extensive joint research on the impact of employment programmes on peacebuilding, funded by the UN-WB Fragility and Conflict Partnership Trust Fund. The research includes a literature review, country-case studies in Lebanon, Liberia and Timor-Leste, and an overall assessment of all employment programmes designed and implemented by the four entities since 2005 in conflict-affected countries, with a more in-depth assessment of a subset of these programmes.
