How to Prevent Civil War Recurrence

Giuditta Fontana is Associate Professor in International Security at the University of Birmingham. She is a political scientist specialising in war-to-peace transitions, with a particular interest in peace agreements and post-conflict political and cultural institutions. She holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science (B.Sc.) and King's College London (M.A., Ph.D.). Her publications include the monograph Education Policy and Power-Sharing in Post-Conflict Societies (2016), and dozens of book chapters and peer reviewed journal articles. She co-convenes the Political Studies Association's Specialist Group on Ethnopolitics and is Associate Editor of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Argyro Kartsonaki is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) at the University of Hamburg. Her area of expertise is peace and security with a particular interest in secessionist conflicts and war-to-peace transitions after civil wars. Her work has been published in Global Studies Quarterly, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Nations and Nationalism, among others. Argyro is the author of the book Breaking Away: Kosovo's Unilateral Secession (2018). She is the co-editor of Ethnopolitics and of OSCE Insights. Natascha S. Neudorfer is Professor of Political Economy at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. She was previously Associate Professor and Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her expertise centres on how economic conditions interact with political institutions, influencing corruption levels, civil war likelihood, and recurrence. She focuses on measurement problems and quantitative research designs, including inferential statistics and machine learning, alongside mixed-methods approaches. Since 2024, Professor Neudorfer has been a commissioning editor for International Affairs. She also served as an associate editor for the Journal of Global Security Studies from 2019 to 2024. Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. A political scientist by background, he specialises in the management of contemporary security challenges. With three decades of experience in UK higher education, Wolff has a publication record that includes 24 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. He is the founding editor of Ethnopolitics, co-founder of Navigating the Vortex , and a regular international affairs contributor to The Conversation.