Postdoctoral Research Associate: Relational Harm – Conflict Studies, Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London, UK. Deadline: 11 July 2025.
King’s College London welcomes applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) in Conflict Studies to work on the project Relational Harm: Targeting the Family in War and Oppression. The PI is Dr Rebekka Friedman, and the project is an ERC-funded Consolidator Grant. The PDRA position is for a 30-month duration starting in January 2026 and will be based in the Department of War Studies.
The PDRA in conflict studies will contribute to the project’s conceptual pillars and to its field research. The PDRA in Conflict Studies will have qualitative and quantitative skills. The PDRA in Conflict Studies will work on mapping relational harm. This will involve looking at when and where family separation occurs in war and counterinsurgency and when youth are targeted or removed from their families and communities. This will include examining existing databases on violence and conflict.
Each PDRA will also oversee and conduct field research in one of the project’s contemporary case studies. PDRAs will use qualitative methods to conduct fieldwork, and to analyse and write up research outputs.
The project examines ‘relational harm’, defined in the project as harm that individuals and communities experience through the targeting and control of their intimate relationships. The project will focus on the forced separation of families as a significant form of relational harm, particularly in the context of state enforced disappearances. It will examine the impact of forced separation on families and communities and will assess why states carry out forced separation during war and counterinsurgency. The project will focus on lived experiences and the wider ongoing political, social, economic, and psychological legacies of relational harm and ambiguous loss. It will look at gendered and intergenerational dimensions and will examine family and family life as fundamental to the waging and experience of war.
The project is interdisciplinary and will utilize mixed methods. The project will have three contemporary case studies: Sri Lanka, Peru, and the Rohingya community (in Bangladesh). The project will also involve archival research into family separation and reunification in the World War Two period.
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