A balancing mind
ETH Zurich peace and conflict researcher Lars-Erik Cederman has won Switzerland’s biggest science award for 2018, the Marcel Benoist Prize. In his research he studies how the fair distribution of power and resources can reduce the risk of ethnic conflicts. As both a person and researcher, a balanced nature is one of his defining features.
Is a divided Syria more peaceful than an intact country? Would the secession of Catalonia – that is, a regional separation from Spain – tend to worsen or minimise the conflict with Madrid?
These are the sort of questions that Lars-Erik Cederman is studying from a globally comparative perspective. Cederman is a political scientist and works with modern data and computer-aided methods.
He was surprised to receive a personal call from the Federal Councillor Johann Schneider-Ammann. He was even more pleased to be the first social scientist to win the Swiss Marcel Benoist Science Prize since the economist Ernst Fehr did in 2008. He will receive the award for his research on the causes and solution approaches for conflicts between ethnic minorities and central state governments.
A passion for politics
Cederman has been Professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zurich since 2003. He grew up in Sweden and now lives in Switzerland with his family. Both countries have left their mark on him. He feels at home in both, and is a citizen of both countries. “Sweden and Switzerland are the same in many ways”, he says. “For example, both countries share the conviction that conflicts can be solved rationally and practically through political consultation and compromises.”
His “passionate interest” in politics has accompanied Cederman, who was born in 1963, since the time he entered student politics as an engineering student at the University of Uppsala. “I liked that so much that from that point onward I wanted to dedicate myself fully to politics”, he recalls, “At the same time it became clear to me that I wouldn’t necessarily make a good politician. So political science was the perfect solution for me.” He then went about implementing his plan.
He completed his engineering studies, but then in 1988 he went to Geneva, where he graduated from the Institute for International Studies with a diploma in international relations. He earned a doctorate in political science in 1994 at the University of Michigan in the United States of America with a dissertation on the development and dissolution of states and nations. After that he lectured at the universities of Oxford, Los Angeles and Harvard.
Inspired by Professor Calculus
He knew that he wanted to become a professor at the age of 15. His inspiration was the character Professor Calculus from the famous comic strip “The Adventures of Tintin”. Unlike the slightly mad professor from the comic, Cederman is neither a lone wolf, nor is he eccentric. He is more of a person concerned with finding balance. This is reflected in his research. One of the things that he has demonstrated is that political and economic inequalities between a centralised state and minorities increase the potential for conflict, while a balanced distribution of power, wealth and the fulfilment of basic needs can stabilise a country.
Cederman’s feeling for balance is also evident in his work: In his research group, he pays attention to an even relationship between individual freedom and team activities. Ultimately, he requires not only comprehensive databases and high computational capacity for his computer-based conflict research, but also a team that complements itself in the collection and analysis of the various data. “It’s important to me that we find a balance between individual creativity and collective performance”, he says.
His team thanked him by nominating him for the prize without telling him. "That makes me proud", says Cederman. The year 2018 has been exceptionally successful for Cederman so far: in addition to the Marcel Benoist Prize, he has also received an ERC Advanced Grant, thanks to which he can now research the interactions between state changes, nationalism and war.
Inequality and separation of power, nationalism, state policy and conflict solution – these subjects have run through Cederman’s work since the start of his career: for instance, three years ago Cederman showed in an article in the American Political Science Review that the combination of federalism and separation of central government power can have the effect of reducing conflict. “Switzerland is a shining example of that”, says Cederman. These conclusions are not undisputed, because there are counterexamples – such as the former Yugoslavia.
Nationalism is a fact that cannot be argued away for normative reasons. Lars-Erik Cederman, 2018 Marcel Benoist Prize Winner.
Nationalism as a subject of research
Cederman and his team use their large database which contains both objective socio-economic data as well as more subjective data concerning people’s motives and attitudes to investigate such uncertainties. For example, they are currently researching how changes to the boundaries of states influence conflicts. “We have evidence that the splintering and reshaping of ethnically defined nations increases the risk of civil wars.” Cederman would now like to test these hypotheses in the new ERC project.
Concerning controversial subjects such as nationalism, Cederman also focuses on demonstrating how it can affect the development of states and democracies. Nationalism, says Cederman, has major disadvantages and can cause conflicts. “Nationalism is a fact that cannot be argued away for normative reasons. It’s a part of our identity, and to a certain degree representative democracy depends on it.” It ultimately contributes to citizens seeing themselves as a national community and helping to support a democratic state because they identify with it.
For Cederman, the crucial factor is how nationalism develops: “Nationalism does not necessarily have to be defined ethnically and exclude others. It can be justified in a constitutional principle, for instance, as Switzerland has done. Having such a non-ethnic nationalism can include other ethnic groups and allow its sovereignty to be shared with other states.”
Sharing is also part of Cederman’s approach to his data: all of the data on the topics of inequality and conflict are bundled in the data set "Ethnic Power Relations" and are available online.
References
Cederman, L-E, Gleditsch, K S, Buhaug H. Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Further publications and information from Lars-Erik Cederman’s research group can be found on his website: icr.ethz.ch.