‘ResearchToday!’ is a research seminar series that shows the width of research in the Business School, and is a forum to foster the collaboration and exchange among interested colleagues.

This week’s seminar presentation will be given by Dr Loua Khalil.

Academic leadership studies have tended to focus mainly on relatively stable contexts. This paper explores
the practice of peace leadership in highly contested and conflicted societies, where public institutions have broken
down, and where leadership is often literally a matter of life, injury or death. On the other hand, academic studies of place -from anthropology (Evans-Pritchard), politics (Castells; Mouffe), regional studies (Harvey; Massey), psychoanalysis (Bion; Bowlby; Klein), and sociology (Bourdieu; Habermas; Foucault) have tended to take greater account of contest and conflict, but have given less attention to leadership in those places.

This paper takes a multi-disciplinary approach and explores the significance of both structure and agency, and of place, culture and courage, in leading for peace in war-torn societies. It aims to examine the nature of the relationship between leadership and place by investigating the dynamics of the place as seen by the leaders and their practices to engaging with these dynamics. This paper is an actor-focused study based on empirical research into the role of civil society leadership in creating and sustaining peace, established on semi-structured interviews with 32 leaders in 2 countries which have experienced intense conflict: Northern Ireland, and Bosnia Herzegovina.