Research areas

About

Peer Schouten is a senior researcher at DIIS and an associate researcher at the International Peace Information Service in Antwerp, and professor at the Conflict Research Group, Ghent University.

His research focuses on order in conflict, with a focus on the role of roadblocks and transit taxes in conflict and state formation; mineral extraction and conflict economies; and the politics of logistics and infrastructure. He has extensive research experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan.

A former SSRC Conflict Research Fellow and Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Peer is the author of Roadblock Politics: the origins of violence in Central Africa (Cambridge University Press), winner of the 2024 Conflict Research Society book award and the International Studies Association's STAIR book prize. 

Current research

Peer Schouten is currently leading a research project on the political economy of checkpoints in conflict, together with the International Center for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups. Read more about it here.

Peer has over ten years of experience in applying an innovative combination of geospatial and qualitative methods to explore conflict dynamics, to speak back to policy and academic debates.

His research has been funded by, amongst others, the FCDO (XCEPT), USAID, WFP, the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Research Councils, Riskbanken, the Carlsberg Foundation, RVI, the Danish Foreign Ministry and the Belgian cooperation.