We are happy to announce that Henrikas Bartusevičius will be joining PRIO in early 2021, and that he has also been awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council.

The aim of Starting Grants is to support early-career researchers who show exceptional talent, the sole criteria of selection being academic excellence.

PRIO is home to several ERC grants, including Consolidator Grants awarded to Halvard Buhaug in 2015, and Jørgen Carling in 2018 and a Starting Grant to Marta Bivand Erdal, also made public today. Now, Henrikas Bartusevičius also will join this group. His project is titled “Adapted to War (AWAR)”. It examines whether humans have evolved psychological adaptations to coalitional aggression and (if yes) how they shape people's attitudes and behavior in the context of contemporary political violence."

“Henrikas Bartusevičius is a long-standing PRIO visitor and partner to PRIO researchers and projects, and we are delighted to be able to invite him back as a full-fledged PRIO researcher. We are also happy and proud to see that PRIO is an attractive host for ERC projects.

AWAR is a very interesting project on a topic important to peace research, with a most innovative take on political psychology,” says PRIO Director Henrik Urdal.