Ms Elisabeth Austrheim1
1University of Queensland, Saint Lucia, Australia
Biography:
Elisabeth (Lis) is a third-year PhD student at the University of Queensland. She is originally from Norway but has lived in Australia since 2022. In her PhD thesis, Lis analyses why some armed conflicts become protracted, and others do not. It seems that some drivers of conflict are more commonly found in long-lasting conflicts compared to shorter-lasting conflicts. Before starting her PhD, Lis worked as a researcher at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre where her main research area was the growing Norwegian offshore wind industry. At the core of her research interests, however, are armed conflicts in the post-WW2 era.
Abstract:
Some armed conflicts appear more resistant to attempts at conflict resolution and find themselves lasting more than double the average length of armed conflicts. Such protracted armed conflicts cause a range of issues, especially for the affected civilian population. Protracted, intractable conflicts are driven by issues that seem particularly difficult to solve and, thus, may point to drivers more commonly found in long-lasting conflicts. Few, however, have studied if these drivers are specific to or more commonly found in those conflicts compared to shorter-lasting ones. By conducting a chi-squared test of independence, this paper has identified 27 independent variables/drivers of conflict with a statistically significant relationship with protraction in armed conflicts that have taken place since the termination of WW2. The variables studied in this project were based on findings from existing studies and theories on long-lasting conflicts (e.g. protracted social conflicts, enduring rivalries, deep-rooted conflicts, moral conflicts, and frozen conflicts) and offer possible narratives of what matters the most for a conflict to become protracted. Variables can both individually and collectively drive protraction. This opens the door for several ways that both individual drivers, but also possible combinations of variables, can produce protraction.