1. Managing Conflict in Practice: The UNIFIL Tripartite Meetings
Date: January 2024 – December 2026
Co-Investigator: Professor Chiara Ruffa, Sciences Po
This project examines how conflict is managed in practice through a detailed study of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Tripartite Meetings. Convened between the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Israel Defence Forces under UN mediation, these meetings constituted the only sustained channel of direct interaction between adversaries along the Blue Line between 2006-2023. The project opens up this rarely examined mechanism from the inside, showing how stability is maintained not through resolution, but through ongoing, structured interaction between actors who remain in a state of entrenched hostility. It conceptualises the Tripartite Meetings as a form of conflict management in practice: a setting in which authority is enacted, tensions are contained, and cooperation is achieved without agreement.
2. Localizing the Women Peace and Security Agenda in the MENA Region
Date: January 2022 – October 2026.
Co-editor: Dr Bilge Sahin, Erasmus University.
This volume (Brill/De Gruyter, forthcoming 2026) offers the first systematic study of how the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is interpreted, adapted, and implemented across the Middle East and North Africa. Through detailed case studies of countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Morocco, Tunisia, and the UAE, the book examines how local actors, governments, and international organizations negotiate the meaning of WPS in diverse political and cultural contexts. By highlighting both the opportunities and limits of WPS localization, the volume provides new insights into the dynamics of gender, security, and governance in a region often overlooked in global WPS scholarship.
3. The Oxford Handbook of Peacekeeping as Social Practice
Date: January 2023 – June 2027
Co-editor: Professor Chiara Ruffa, Sciences Po
This forthcoming volume (Oxford University Press, 2027) brings together 43 leading scholars and practitioners to advance a new way of studying peacekeeping as social practice. Moving beyond approaches that prioritise mandates, design, or outcomes, the Handbook shows how peace operations are enacted through everyday interactions, organisational routines, and situated decision-making. By bringing feminist, constructivist, postcolonial, and practice-oriented perspectives into sustained dialogue, the volume reframes peacekeeping as a dynamic and contested form of global governance—one that must be understood through how it is carried out in practice. In doing so, it provides the most comprehensive account to date of how peacekeeping is interpreted, studied, and experienced across different contexts.
Vanessa F Newby PhD 