News
SED Researchers Awarded £496,000 for Urban Violence Project
A joint bid headed by researchers at the School of Environment and Development has been awarded £496,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the UK Department of International Development (DfID) for an international project on urban violence. The project is entitled 'Understanding the Tipping Point of Urban Conflict: Violence, Cities, and Poverty Reduction in the Developing World' and will run for two years, starting on 1 September 2010.
The research is led by Professor Caroline Moser of the Global Urban Research Centre (GURC), and Dr Dennis Rodgers of the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI), and will explore the validity and policy relevance of the factors conventionally associated with urban violence in four cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: Mombasa (Kenya), Patna (India), Dili (Timor Leste) and Santiago de Chile (Chile).
Cities have long been understood as conflictual spaces, but the reasons why this conflict tips over into overt violence in some cities and not in others are poorly understood. Globally increasing levels of violence in cities, whether based on endemic gang, crime or drug-related violence, gender-based attacks, ethnic strife, terrorism, or outright warfare, make this a critical issue to consider, particularly as it is widely recognised that violence has implications not only for country and metropolitan level development, but first and foremost for the livelihoods of the poor who are at the frontlines of urban conflict, so to speak.
Over the past few years, a particular conventional wisdom has emerged within development policy and research circles concerning urban violence, associating it with four key factors, namely poverty; large youth populations; the failure to treat women's security and safety in cities as a specific concern; and the absence of state authority in local communities. This conventional wisdom has underpinned a range of widely applied policy initiatives which have failed to stem the tide of urban violence, fear, and insecurity. This suggests that the conventional wisdom underlying current violence-reduction interventions is flawed, and the proposed research project aims to explore the validity of the factors conventionally associated with the propagation of urban violence, as well as offer new insights into the dynamics of urban conflict.
In addition to Professor Moser and Dr. Rodgers, the project brings together an international team of researchers drawn from both local civil society and global academic institutions including Eco-Build Africa (Kenya), the Institute for Human Development (India), Corporación SUR (Chile) and the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland).
27 April 2010