Please join us join in person in room S11 or online as post-soviet security experts and conflict management practitioners Dr. Grazvydas Jasutis and Henry Wathen present, "The Paradox of Chechen Blood Feud: When Revenge Prevents Violence."
About the Seminar
Blood feud in Chechnya is usually portrayed as an archaic cycle of vengeance. But what if it can also restrain violence, impose responsibility, and create pathways towards reconciliation? This talk explores three intellectual puzzles: When does revenge escalate conflict and when does the threat of revenge deter it? Can an informal institution provide social order where formal justice is weak? And what happens to blood feud when traditional norms collide with war, displacement and modern state institutions? Join us for a discussion that challenges the simple distinction between revenge and conflict resolution.
About the Speakers
Grazvydas Jasutis is a conflict management practitioner and scholar. He has worked with the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, NATO, the European Union, and the OSCE, and has been deployed to Indonesia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, and Georgia. He spent more than five years in the Caucasus, working on confidence-building, ceasefire monitoring, and research on local communities and conflict dynamics. He also teaches at universities and academic institutions in Switzerland and France.
Henry Wathen is a former Swedish civil servant at the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA), which was his professional base from 2003 through 2021. He served as liaison officer to the Swedish Armed Forces and focal point for various civil-military training and learning activities. He has been seconded to EU missions in North Macedonia, BiH, Kosovo, Iraq and Georgia. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in War Studies with the Royal Military College of Canada.
Discussant: Vassily Klimentov is a Research Associate with the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding, and a SNSF Ambizione Principal Investigator and Lecturer in the History Department of Centre for Eastern European Studies, University of Zurich.
Online meeting information to come.
About the Seminars
Each semester, CCDP hosts a series of internal seminars to give our faculty, staff and affiliates the opportunity to present their work and receive feedback. The goal of the seminars is to have an informal and frank conversation about the research presented, and exchange ideas across disciplines and expertise, going beyond academic silos. Speakers at the seminars are both early career and senior scholars.
Eliza Urwin is organising the seminars for the academic year. For further information, get in touch at eliza.urwin@graduateinstitute.ch.