A jury consisting of Jon Hovi (University of Oslo), Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (University of Iowa) and Gerald Schneider (University of Konstanz) has awarded the first JPR Article of the Year Award to Philip Verwimp of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, and the Households in Conflict Network. In its assessment of all research articles published in volume 43 of JPR, the jury paid attention to theoretical rigour, methodological sophistication and substantive relevance. According to the jury, the prize-winning article ‘Machetes and Firearms: The Organization of Massacres in Rwanda’, Journal of Peace Research 43(1): 5–22, is a most innovative piece of work. It systematically examines how the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide organized the massacres. The author draws on established theories and makes careful use of a new dataset that contains information on 59,000 victims. More broadly, the article is an example of a new generation of conflict studies that move the analytical focus from the level of the state or even state system down to the individual actor, be it a victim or a perpetrator of political violence.
Philip Verwimp obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Leuven in 2003 and has been a lecturer at the Institute of Social Studies since 2005. The award is USD 1,000.
Honourable mention goes to the runners-up: Valentin L. Krustev, ‘Interdependence and the Duration of Militarized Conflict’, JPR 43(3): 243–260; and Galia Press-Barnathan, ‘The Neglected Dimension of Commercial Liberalism: Economic Cooperation and Transition to Peace’, JPR 43(3): 261–278.
