Jana Krause
✉️ jana.krause(@)stv.uio.no
I am Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo and currently Director of the MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies (PECOS). My research focuses on civilian agency and protection in communal conflicts and civil wars, peace processes, climate change and local peacebuilding, and the gender dimensions of peacebuilding. During the academic year 2024/25, I am also a Fellow at the Centre for International Security at the Hertie School in Berlin.
Over the past fifteen years, I have conducted hundreds of interviews in conflict zones about how civilians protect themselves and build peace locally, including South Sudan, Kenya, Myanmar, as well as Indonesia and Nigeria. I am the author of Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War (Cambridge University Press 2018) and co-editor of ‘Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings’ (Oxford University Press 2023).
My research has won several awards, including the 2019 Lee Ann Fujii Award from the APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Section for my book ‘Resilient Communities‘. I also received the 2020 Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award from the Journal of Peace Research for my article ‘Restrained or Constrained? Election, Communal Conflicts, and Variation in Sexual Violence‘. My work has been funded by the European Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden, among others.
Previously, I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. In 2019/20, I was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Before that, I was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, and at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University. I studied political science and international relations at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. I hold a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
I have lived in Berlin, Geneva, London, and Amsterdam, and now live with my husband and daughter in Oslo, Norway.
CV
Krause, Jana, Juan Masullo, Emily Paddon Rhoads and Jennifer Welsh (eds). 2023. Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings. Oxford University Press.
More than half the world’s population live in violent settings, such as civil wars, communal conflicts, cities plagued by gang violence, and entire areas governed by criminal organizations. Living exposed to diverse forms of violence, individuals and communities have found innovative—and sometimes counterintuitive—ways to protect themselves and others. Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings establishes the study of civilian agency and its protective dimension across various violent settings as a systematic and unified field of research. This book brings together researchers spanning several social science disciplines to study civilian protective agency in different violent settings, including civil war, genocide, communal violence, and organized crime, and in various geographical locations, from Syria to Mozambique, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Iraq to Colombia and Western Europe. The book also offers conceptual foundations, new theoretical insights, and detailed empirics that advance our understanding of civilian protective agency and promote future research on the topic that is comparable, tractable, and cumulative.
Read Introduction
Krause, Jana. 2018. Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War. Cambridge University Press.
2019 Book Prize Winner: Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods (IMM) Conference Group of the American Political Science Association, sponsored by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group
2019 Book Prize Runner-Up: Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Award
Related policy brief: Women, Peace and Security: Prevention and Resolution of Communal Conflicts