Professor Richard Caplan
About
Professor Richard Caplan’s principal research interests are concerned with international organisations and conflict management, with a particular focus on peacekeeping and post-conflict peace- and state-building. He is the Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project 'After Exit: Assessing the Consequences of United Nations Peacekeeping Withdrawal', which is investigating conditions on the ground in countries that have hosted large-scale UN peacekeeping operations. (See the After Exit website for more details.)
He is also Co-Investigator of the Oxford Martin School-funded programme on 'Transboundary Resource Management', which is exploring the scope for cross-border co-operation on natural resource management in the eastern Nile River Basin and Israel, Palestine and Jordan, where growing pressures on water and energy threaten regional destabilisation. (See the Oxford Martin School website for more details.)
Professor Caplan is a member of the World Food Programme’s Peace Evidence Experts Research (PEER) Group and a member of the Folke Bernadotte Academy’s International Research Working Group on Peacekeeping. He has served as a member of the International Panel of the UK National Security Risk Assessment; a Specialist-Advisor to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in the UK House of Commons; a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS); Editor of World Policy Journal; and New York Director of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). He has also served as a consultant to the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) and has been a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States.
Expertise
- Armed conflict
- International security
- International organizations and conflict management
- United Nations
- Peacekeeping
- Post-conflict peace- and state-building
- Humanitarian intervention
- International Relations
Selected publications
- Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices, and Politics, Oxford University Press, 2019
- Exit Strategies and State Building (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2012
- International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, 2005
- Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- A New Trusteeship? The International Administration of War-Torn Territories, Adelphi Paper No. 341, Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002
- Europe’s New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict (ed. with J. Feffer), Oxford University Press, 1996
Media experience
Professor Caplan has experience of working with the media including radio and television interviews.
Recent media work
- Interview with Caplan in Helsingin Sanomat (Finland) on current challenges facing the UN
- Interview with Caplan in tëvë1 (Kosovo) on recent tensions between Serbia and Kosovo
- Televised interview with Caplan in Euronews (Bulgaria) on Finland and Sweden joining NATO
- Interview with Caplan (in Albanian) on the RFE/RL website regarding Putin's comparison of NATO's 1999 bombing in support of Koso
- Interview with Caplan La Nación (in Spanish) on the war in Ukraine
- Interview with Caplan in Oxford Strategy Review on the future of UN peacekeeping
Languages
English