Laurence Cooley

Biography

Laurence came to the University of Birmingham in 2007 to start an ESRC-funded MA and PhD. Previously, he studied at the University of Bath and Queen's University Belfast, and worked at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. His PhD on the EU's approach to conflict resolution in the Western Balkans was supervised by Thomas Diez, Michelle Pace and Tim Haughton. During his PhD, Laurence spent time as a visiting student at both the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University and the Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, Laurence was appointed as a Teaching Fellow in IDD, following a period as a visiting lecturer in POLSIS and CREES and as part-time Impact and Outreach Assistant for the GSDRC. In February 2017, he started a new role within IDD, as a Research Fellow funded by the ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme. Between June 2017 and May 2018, he is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast.

Research Interest

Laurence's PhD research (thesis available here) explored the EU's approach to conflict resolution in the Western Balkans, and sought to explain the apparent preference of EU actors for consociational power-sharing mechanisms of managing conflict in deeply divided societies. From February 2017 to January 2019, Laurence is working on a new project, funded by the ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme, which investigates the relationship between census politics and the design of power-sharing institutions, with a particular empirical focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. Since completing his PhD, Laurence has also published research on the governance of sport in deeply divided societies, and in September 2016 convened a panel on sport and the Sustainable Development Goals at the Development Studies Association annual conference.