“Spotlight on...” New Doctoral Researcher Theodora Benesch

What is your main motivation to address the topic of your PhD?

To get a political science perspective on political processes back into (impact evaluations in) peacebuilding! Impact evaluations are being more and more applied to evaluate peacebuilding programmes and are so far mainly shaped by development economists (at least that’s what I see from my angle) who think differently about peace and conflict processes. Within the literature, there is a large focus on individual attitudes and behavior which is assumed (but this assumption is also critiqued) to aggregate up to larger group and macro-level dynamics. While this focus also stems from the difficulty of assigning a treatment randomly, so institutions or laws are often avoided, I would like to push everyone – including myself – to think harder about how to shape political processes from the bottom up. This is my main motivation for this PhD topic.

What are you looking most forward to during your PhD studies?

I am mostly looking forward to the possibility of conducting research trips and stays (I hope to be able to organise one at my old university), as well as to engage in conversations both with other researchers and practitioners working on the broader topic of how to build peace after conflict or maintain peace under pressure. Beyond that, I look forward to improving my methodology and writing skills to come out of this period hopefully a little wiser but in either case more skilled for what comes next.

What would you like the impact of your project to be?

A utopian impact would be to increase awareness and understanding by everyone working in and on peacebuilding of how peacebuilding processes work on different levels – for individual participants in programmes, between groups or as a political process at the national level, and whether and how these different processes can be linked to each other. I don’t think every project, particularly if bottom-up, can and should affect peace processes at all levels, but I got the impression that many researchers and practitioners hope to be able to address them all, which in turn makes peacebuilding programmes and research worse. If my PhD project turns out to be as I currently envision it and gets some people to think differently about peacebuilding impact, that would be an amazing outcome already.

Theory or practice: Both! But if I have to decide, practice – Having conducted research on peacebuilding practice and being nagged by a need for better theory and empirical research shaped my PhD question and journey so far.

Qualitative or quantitative: Quantitative! Personally, I think quantitative research gives you a bigger picture even though the data’s validity is always debatable. Yet I also rely on qualitative research for theory building a lot. In the end, both methodologies are important and researchers from each corner should engage more with each other’s findings.