Organizing Institutions


Welcome to the NFU Conference 2010!

The conference will be an opportunity for exchange of knowledge and experience among researchers and practitioners from multiple fields of relevance for development studies.

The NFU conference is intended as a forum for development research, and the conference is therefore open for workshop contributions on other relevant topics of the field.

Time: 25-26 November, 2010
Venue: Det teologiske Menighetsfakultet (MF Norwegian School of Theology), Oslo

Many societies and communities in the South are faced with multiple crises in the form of armed conflicts and violence, HIV/AIDS, climate change and financial crises. This creates situations of fragility and vulnerability with weak and fragile state and community institutions. Ability to meet the crises on community level is often overlooked and poorly researched and not used in informing national and international policies and strategies for interventions. Understanding communities and state resilience in situations of crises and how this affects their ability to withstand pressure and not develop into armed conflict or humanitarian crises is vital.

While many conferences recently have focussed on opportunities and new positive developments in the South, the NFU Conference 2010 will put the focus on how states and communities address crises and respond to them. The main emphasis will thereby not be on the crises themselves, but on the dynamics behind them, and responses to them, and how we as researchers address this research field. The new research agenda needs to link peoples everyday life and resistance, community resilience and civil organisations' role in building resilience, and state capacity and political settlement in peace building and post-conflict situations.

The plenary sessions:

  • Plenary 1: Conflicts and political settlements: James Putzel, comments by Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona and Marit Haug
  • Plenary 2: Religion, conflict and development: Jeffrey Haynes, comments by Stein Villumstad
  • Plenary 3: Climate Change and the Urban Poor in the Global South: David Satterthwaite, comments by Karen O'Brien
  • Plenary 4: Policy discussion: Silent crises, politics, mobilization and development research: Sarah Cook, Hege Hertzberg, Atle Sommerfeldt, Malcolm Langford (moderator)

There will be four parallel workshop sessions during the two days.

Organizing Committee:

Hans Morten Haugen
Associate Professor at Diakonhjemmet University College
Gunnar Heiene
Professor at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Heading Department of Social Science
Berit Aasen
Senior Researcher at Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research

Conference Coordinator: Solveig Elin Bru-Olsen
Please direct questions to: (NB: E-mail no longer available)