The study of civil war, conflict, rebellion, insurgency and other forms of organized political violence has made many significant advances over the past two or so decades. Innovations in quantitative methods and experimental designs have been combined with the demands for more rigour and transparency. The field has clearly diversified, offering a home to many different approaches and techniques from various disciplinary and methodological backgrounds.

The aim of the workshop was to further cutting-edge research on civil war and political violence across different communities to advance the field as a whole. The workshop follows over a year of engagement between the Institute of Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham and the Chair for Qualitative Empirical Methods in Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt, culminating in a joint section at the Annual Convention of the European Consortium for Political Research (Hamburg, August 2018).

Participants from the University of Birmingham included Dr Natascha Neudorfer, Dr Laurence Cooley and Dr Christalla Yakinthou.