Vice Chancellor’s Innovation award for Annette Idler

Annette Idler won the Early Career Innovator category in the Vice-Chancellor Innovation Awards for her work on Re-thinking Conflict, Building Peace. She was also Highly Commended in the Inspiring Leadership category. The Vice-Chancellor Innovation Awards celebrate research-led innovation that is having societal or economic impact.

Annette Idler’s work examines two interrelated questions. Firstly, in relation to re-thinking conflict, how does armed conflict change dynamically and what are the consequences for people-centred security? As principal investigator of the 4-year Changing Character of Conflict Platform project, Idler addresses this question with her interdisciplinary 18-people-team that brings together ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative analysis, complexity science, visualization techniques, visual arts, and historical tracing back to the Thirty Years War.

Secondly, in relation to building peace, what are the implications of transitions from war to peace for security architectures? Following requests by the Colombian government, Idler established the internationally recognized research programme: From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace (CONPEACE). As Programme Director and PI of four projects hosted by CONPEACE, Idler leads a 10-people-team that examines changing security landscapes, e.g. on the double crisis of insecurity and humanitarian plight at the Colombia-Venezuela border.

As a result of her work UN practitioners now account for the dynamic and cross-border character of conflict in their analysis and Colombian stakeholders from power centres and marginalized communities narrowed the gap between their respective understandings of security needs.