AXA Research Fund, AXA’s global scientific philanthropy initiative, announces the new projects to be funded in 2017.

From a total of 38 new projects selected from worldwide, three of them are Spanish, and one belongs to Lesley Ann Daniels, Postdoctoral Fellow at IBEI.

Lesley Ann Daniels’ research project analyses how the granting of the identity rights affects to peace processes; if they make it more or less durable, and in which way the contribute to the stability of a society.

To answer these questions, the research statistically analyzes cases of post-Cold War peace agreements to understand the connections between rights and the stability of peace. The study includes a thorough comparison of two similar cases: Aceh, Indonesia, and Mindanao, in the Philippine Islands. Two societies that have had a different track record after the peace agreements despite having similar starting points and claims. Both are island regions that demanded more recognition of their own language, as well as being able to introduce a stricter Islamism in their educational and judicial system. With these concessions achieved, in Indonesia the situation is stable while in the Philippines a dissident group continues the violence. Lesley Ann Daniels’s research aims to understand the reasons for these differences, with the ultimate goal of helping design peace agreements to reduce the risk of a return to violence.

You can check here the AXA Research Fund page for more information on Lesley Ann Daniels’s project.

With this project, IBEI counts with two investigations selected by the AXA Research Fund. Fulya Apaydin, Postdoctoral Researcher at IBEI, currently counts with an AXA Research Fund grant for research into the processes through which economic actors (such as entrepreneurs, consumer groups, trade unions and politicians) negotiate a distribution Balance of socio-economic risks. His case study is to find out why in Islamic banks, limited by religious codes and shaped by their national context, large variations in their results and responses to market risk can be observed.

You can check here the AXA Research Fund page for more information on the Fulya Apaydin project.