The Swedish Research Council has granted me and my colleagues Johan Brosché and Corinne Bara 4.5 million SEK for the research project Crossing the Rubicon: The dynamics of restraint in civil war. From the application abstract: In 2018, more than half of all people killed in the...
On 15 January, I successfully defended my monograph dissertation in peace and conflict research and earned the title of Dr Sebastian van Baalen. My faculty-appointed opponent was Professor Scott Straus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my grading committee consisted of Dr Bart Klem (University...
On 17 December, I "nailed" my dissertation Guns and Governance: Local Elites and Rebel Governance in Côte d'Ivoire. I will defend the dissertation on 15 January 2021. From the abstract: Close to one billion people live in conflict zones around the world, many of them in...
Selected popular analyses of the Ivorian presidential elections in 2020, written in collaboration with Jesper Bjarnesen. We published op-eds about the elections in several outlets, including in Democracy in Africa and Political Violence @ A Glance. Report: Ouattara's Third-Term Bid Raises Old Fears: Risk of Violence...
In October 2020, I was awarded the Cedric Smith Prize by the Conflict Research Society for the best article or thesis chapter in peace and conflict research by a PhD student. The motivation read as follows: Sebastian’s winning article “Guns and governance: Local elites, civil resistance,...