CENTREPEACE at EISA and UACES 2026
CENTREPEACE researchers presented at the EISA and UACES conferences in Lisbon and Prague, with contributions on Russia, the EU's contested neighborhood, and Europe's defence industry.
Academic skills course: Integrating Quantitative Data into Qualitative Research
From 9 to 11 September 2026, the PRIO Research School on Peace and Conflict in Oslo hosted a academic skills course on bringing quantitative data, from democracy indices to conflict maps, into qualitative research.
Democracy indices, conflict event data, geocoded maps, and survey results increasingly sit alongside the interviews, archives, and fieldwork of peace and security researchers. Used well, they can sharpen a qualitative argument rather than dilute it. The academic skills course Integrating quantitative data into qualitative research set out to show how.
Organized by the PRIO Research School on Peace and Conflict within the CENTREPEACE project, the course was led by Nicholas Marsh, who opened the program with an introductory session. From there, PRIO researchers guided participants through key datasets in peace and conflict research and the skills needed to turn data into publishable work.
Acting Director Haakon Gjerløw introduced the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and the challenge of measuring a concept as contested as democracy. On the second day, Research Director Siri Aas Rustad presented the Conflict Trends datasets, which track patterns of organized violence worldwide, and Senior Researcher Andreas Forø Tollefsenshowed how spatial data such as the PRIO-GRID can place conflict and its consequences on the map. Research Professor Marta Bivand Erdal opened the final day with a session on survey data and what it can reveal about how people perceive and respond to conflict.
The last afternoon moved from data to the page. Research Professor Bruno Oliveira Martins shared practical advice on publishing in a good journal, while Special Advisor Lynn P. Nygaard closed the program with a session on integrating graphs, maps, and tables into qualitative texts so that visuals become part of the argument itself.
Throughout the three days, the sessions were highly interactive, and the exchanges between participants and PRIO researchers sparked lively discussions about how quantitative evidence can best serve qualitative inquiry.
The course put CENTREPEACE's values into practice: methodological openness, rigor and transparency in research, and the sharing of expertise across institutions and borders. It also reflected a commitment to equipping the next generation of peace and security scholars with tools that make their work both sharper and more credible.
