Sharing the State for Peace? Advances and Challenges in the Study of Territorial Self-Governance as a Tool of Conflict Management

After decades of scholarship, it remains contested amongst academics and policy-makers alike how useful territorial self-governance can be in reducing the risk of territory-centered civil wars. This is problematic, including from a policy perspective, as – according to the most recent UCDP/PRIO data – territory-centered conflicts account for approximately 63% of all violent conflicts between 2008 and 2018, and we know that they are generally long-lasting, costly in their impact on human lives and livelihoods, and hard to resolve sustainably. In this Section, we invite contributors to reflect upon the current state of the art on territorial self-governance as a tool of conflict management, by focussing on advances and challenges in the following areas: i.) conceptual issues in the definition of different forms of territorial self-governance, conflict, peace and violence; ii.) theoretical assumptions in the study of institutional design as a tool of conflict management; iii.) methodological considerations in data collection and analysis; and iv.) knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic communities. Contributions to the Section are welcome to cover qualitative, quantitative, multi- or mixed method approaches, with possible themes including for instance progress and stagnation in the institutionalist approach to conflict management; the relationships between academics and stakeholders of territory-centered conflict research; top-down vs. bottom-up approaches in peacebuilding initiatives; opportunities and pitfalls of the quantitative turn in the civil wars literature; gender dimensions of territory-centered violence and peace; points of support and resistance for decolonised research on territory-centered conflict, peace and violence.