Laura Wise is a Research Fellow and Programme Coordinator with the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), at Edinburgh Law School.
Laura’s research explores the margins of peace processes and conflict-affected societies and their intersections with the politics of inclusion. She is particularly interested in the Women, Peace and Security agenda, peace process design, and ceasefires.
As a Co-Investigator of the PeaceRep consortium, Laura leads research projects investigating inclusive peace process implementation, and local peace processes in fragmented conflicts. This research is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO). Her work on gender perspectives in peace processes regularly informs governmental and inter-governmental policymaking, most recently the UN Secretary General's annual report on women, peace and security.
Laura is the Thematic Lead for Comparative Learning for a 2024-2025 Conflict, Stability and Security Fund grant, led by the University of Stirling with partners in Myanmar, to explore potential pathways for inclusive change in Myanmar, including the challenges and opportunities for women’s participation in dialogue in the context of increased digitalisation. She is a co-author of the PA-X Peace Agreements Database, a dataset of all peace agreements globally from 1990 to 2022, and a co-creator of PeaceFem, a mobile phone app that illustrates women’s inclusion in peace processes around the world.
Laura holds a BSc Econ in International Politics and the Third World from Aberystwyth University and an MA in Comparative Ethnic Conflict from Queen's University Belfast. As part of the PeaceRep team, she is a 2023 recipient of the RSE Mary Somerville Medal which recognises exceptional achievement in research in teamwork and collaborative endeavour within Scottish Higher Education Institutes.