“We need to reinvent the way we think about studying war and peace,” says Patrick Regan, a professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
“War is an easy outcome to measure. War you can observe all the time. But just knowing how wars start doesn’t give you that much purchase on how to end war. So, we have to find a way to think about modeling peace as an outcome instead of modeling war.”
Regan’s research and teaching interests include conflict management, civil wars, external interventions, and the politics of climate change. At Notre Dame, he also directs the Kroc Institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project.
His work involves evaluating how interventions shape conflict, paying particular attention to the interaction between military interventions and diplomatic mediation in civil wars. Regan also is interested in the conditions under which opposition protest movements have the potential to escalate to civil war and how external actors can influence that process.
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