Teaching at the Conflict Research Network West Africa

Claudia, you are a PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zürich. Can you tell us a little bit about your research and the types of questions you engage with on a daily basis?

I research armed conflicts from the perspective of political science. This means I am interested in the question of why armed conflicts emerge and how we can understand their dynamics – that is, their escalation and de-escalation, their spatial variation, etc. In my PhD project, I investigate how civil wars are interlinked with other, more localized types of collective violence, for example between different livelihood or religious communities. I use social network analysis to theorize and empirically assess these interlinkages. Doing so, I focus on the armed conflicts in Nigeria. Nigeria has been affected by the highly violent Boko Haram conflict between violent extremists and the government, but also by conflicts between farmers and herders, banditry, and ethno-religiious tensions.

Can you tell us about the external pageConflict Research Network West Africa (CORN)call_made, and how your relationship came to be?

CORN is a knowledge platform and academic community for conflict researchers in West Africa, and particularly Nigeria. They conduct workshops and conferences and publish working papers, among other things. I had followed their activities on social media, which always sounded super interesting. I had also briefly been in touch with their Director, Tarila Marclint Ebiede, when planning my own research stay in Nigeria two years before.

The idea for the workshop came up when I saw that CORN is conducting a workshop to train early career researchers in the quantitative analysis of the same dataset I am using in my work (called Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset, ACLED). I reached out to them, offering to teach a session on social network analysis as part of the course. After some discussions, we decided that it would be more useful to have a separate workshop on social network analysis, not least because of the complexity of the approach. Luckily, this was possible with the financial support by ETH4D.

What made you decide to conduct a Teaching Stay at CORN? What was the experience like?

I had thought about the possibility of teaching in Nigeria before, also considering organizing a workshop on my own. Looking back, I am very glad I decided to do it with CORN, as this made things much easier and allowed me to expand my own network. On the one hand, CORN did an amazing job in recruiting the participants and organizing the logistics, including for myself. This way, I could focus on the content of the course and did not have to worry about anything else. This was also a great relief in terms of workload during my last year of the PhD.

On the other hand, the connection to CORN was super valuable for me to get in touch with Nigerian researchers and learn more about their work. We had planned the workshop as a pre-event for a conference on social protection organized by CORN, which meant that many researchers from other regions had come to the capital Abuja. This was super useful for me and also allowed some of the workshop participants to stay for the conference.

Do you have a sense of what your students took away from your stay? What did you learn from them?

A three-day workshop was an ambitious timeframe to introduce the participants to a new theoretical perspective, analytical method, and software. The main goal of the workshop was thus to provide a basic introduction, which would allow the scholars to deepen their understanding independently after the workshop. Based on the feedback questionnaire, which we sent around after the workshop, most participants felt that they are now able to do this. I also hope that the basic introduction to the programming language R was useful for them, since they can use R, even if they will not work with network analysis in the future.

In addition, my impression was that the workshop participants built good rapport with each other. For example, I really appreciated how they supported each other throughout the course. Most of them knew each other because they had participated in another workshop together and I wish that they continue to maintain these relationships and the resulting research community across Nigerian institutions.

For me, it was super helpful to work on the Nigeria data together with them and learn about their interpretation of the results. I also used the opportunity to get the perspective of some of them on my own project. But beyond the “academic usefulness” of the workshop for my own research, I just very much enjoyed working with the group, which was very dedicated, smart, and funny. I always liked teaching and the workshop reminded me why.


What would you say to other ETH researchers who are interested in conducting a teaching stay through an ETH4D Faculty Exchange grant?

I would encourage other ETH researchers to seize this opportunity to connect with researchers and institutions in the respective country and to exchange knowledge with them. I experienced it as a privilege that I could return to Nigeria after my first stay in 2021, expand my research network, and share some of the tools I learned throughout the PhD.

At the same time, ETH researchers should also consider the grant from the perspective of research ethics and decolonizing academia. At least in the social sciences, there is a tendency that scholars travel to low-income countries to conduct their own research, extract knowledge, and then develop their own careers “back home.” From this perspective, grants like the ETH4D Faculty Exchange grant, but also those grants enabling South-North mobility, are critical to actively foster knowledge transfer and provide resources to strengthen the research communities in the respective country.

I would further recommend collaborating with a local partner institution. If this institution can help with the logistics and design of the course – to make sure it meets the needs of the participants – such a workshop is not even that much work. I, at least, was positively surprised how easy and smooth the whole process went – thanks to the excellent work of CORN. It was also a great help that the ETH4D is very supportive and tries to make the administrative part of the process as easy as possible.