Author Archive

Christoph Steinert

Christoph Steinert finished his MPhil in International Relations at Somerville College in June 2018. His major research interests lie in the areas of conflict research, post-conflict justice, and the political economy of inequality. He currently interns at the High Commissioner of Human Rights in Geneva and he will afterwards commence his doctoral studies.

Conflict researchers tend to dichotomise the parties involved in armed conflicts. While this dyadic perspective provides a useful simplification for the purpose of ordering the inherently unordered, it also leads to misperceptions and misrepresentations of the dynamics on the ground. Just as interstate conflicts are not necessarily fought between only two countries, intrastate conflict is rarely solely an affair of just governments and a rebel group. Omissions of other belligerents are particularly problematic if the neglected actors are systematically more prone to violent actions, or if they exert disproportionate impacts on the trajectories of conflicts and their aftermaths. Against this backdrop, our research, forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research, highlights the specific impact of pro-government militias on the risk …