Professor Dr Lars-Erik Cederman

Research priorities: armed conflict, civil war, ethnic inequality, nationalism, state formation
Lars-Erik Cederman is a Swedish-Swiss political scientist who specializes in conflict research. The link between armed conflicts and macrohistorical processes such as state formation and nationalism is the focus of his research. He examines the effect of ethnopolitical and ethno-economic inequalities on civil wars and the question of how power-sharing and the resulting decline in inequality can reduce conflicts.
His research group focuses on the link between inequality and political violence. Cederman assumes that ethnic inequality and ethnonationalist mobilization may trigger civil wars. Over the years, his research team has collected and analyzed data on ethnic groups and their participation in conflict processes. This research resulted in the database "Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) Dataset Family".
In his ERC Advanced Grant Project, Cederman is developing a new theory of nationalist state transformation. He is testing this theory using historical maps and archival data selected through machine learning. He thus examines how states are formed, how nationalism changes external borders and internal structures, and how these processes interact with wars. The objective is to determine the impact of reform proposals, such as territorial division, on risk minimization of emerging conflicts.