Laura Wise

Laura Wise is a Research Fellow and Programme Coordinator with the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep).

Laura’s research explores the margins of peace processes and conflict-affected societies – including conceptual, spatial and temporal margins – and their intersections with the politics of inclusion. She is particulary interested in multi-level peace processes (especially local), ethnopolitics and non-dominant minorities, ceasefires, and women, peace and security.

As part of the PeaceRep consortium, Laura is leading research projects investigating local peace processes in fragmented conflicts, and the role of gender and ethnic minorities in local peace agreement implementarion. This research is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO). Her work on gender perspectives in peace agreements has informed United Nations policy on gender and peace processes, most recently the UN Secretary General's annual report on women, peace and security.

Laura is part of the team behind the PA-X Peace Agreements Database, a dataset of all peace agreements globally from 1990 to 2022, and a co-creator of PeaceFem, a mobile phone app that illustrates women’s inclusion in peace processes around the world. All of her areas of research include development and use of innovative data and PeaceTech tools to support analysis for research, policy and practice.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura led research for the Covid Collective to investigate PeaceTech methods of understanding pandemic ceasefires. From 2020-2022, she collected and analysed responses to the UN Ceasefire Call as a co-creator of the "Ceasefires in a time of Covid-19" interactive tracker, and has published multiple resources on vaccination ceasefires during public health emergencies.

Her work has been published in various academic journals, book chapters, policy, and online outlets, including Contemporary Peacemaking, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Sudosteuropa, British Academy, Transconflict and LSE Women, Peace and Security. She has previously worked as a researcher for the UN Women project 'Enhancing Women’s Leadership for Sustainable Peace in Fragile Contexts in the MENA Region', supporting women engaged in peace processes in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya.

Laura holds a BSc Econ in International Politics and the Third World from Aberystwyth University and an MA in Comparative Ethnic Conflict from Queen's University Belfast. She was the 2011/2012 recipient of the International Politics Finalists' Dissertation Prize from Aberystwyth University, for her work 'Moral quandaries of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1995'.

• Peace agreements and peace processes
• Local peace processes
• Minority rights and kin-state politics
• Women, peace and security
• Ceasefires