Scholarship and Biography
Pamina Firchow is an Associate Professor in the Global Sustainability Masters Program. Her research explores how the everyday intersects with peace, security, and governance, with particular attention to the ways that marginalized voices articulate alternative visions of justice and security. Her research demonstrates how everyday practices of peace and resistance unsettle conventional categories of international relations and advances methodological innovation through “participatory numbers,” which bridge the rigor of quantitative approaches with the contextual depth of participatory qualitative research. Exemplified in the Everyday Peace Indicators project, which she co-founded and leads, this work provides policymakers with empirically rigorous yet locally grounded insights. Across her scholarship, she remains theoretically informed, empirically grounded, and committed to policy relevance, particularly in relation to peace, development and human rights.
In her book Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year award, she demonstrates how community-generated indicators reveal intersections of gender, class, race, and coloniality in shaping lived experiences of peace and security. This work, alongside twenty-nine peer reviewed articles published in high-ranking journals such as World Development, International Affairs, International Studies Review, Politics, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Sociological Methods and Research and International Political Sociology, advances a participatory methodological approach that foregrounds everyday voices and gendered experiences while contributing to broader theoretical debates.
Her current research examines how data is used in knowledge production and conflict response, particularly in an era where AI intensifies the challenges of relying on data gathered at a distance from the very populations it claims to represent. She currently has a book under review entitled “The Data Myth: Can Better Data Lead to Better Conflict Response?” (with Roger Mac Ginty). This book, an elaboration of an article published in 2024, argues that the rush for speed and “objectivity” when using data can obscure power, distort evidence, and undermine meaningful action when it comes to responding to conflict. It makes the case for ethical, critical, and patient approaches to data that expose power dynamics and rethink what counts as “evidence.” By slowing down and asking harder questions, it shows how data can be used more responsibly to support meaningful responses in conflict-affected societies.
Firchow has a robust track record of obtaining research funding at both the university and the Everyday Peace Indicators NGO (which she established in 2018) from a diversity of private and public funders, including the biggest grant given by the US Institute of Peace in its 35+ year history, as well as the largest evaluation commissioned by the Inter-American Foundation since its founding in 1969. She has received several fellowships and visiting invitations from institutions such as Fulbright, the US Institute of Peace, where I was a Senior Jennings Randolph Fellow, Uppsala University, the European University Institute and the Rotary Foundation. She is also a research fellow of the Center for Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She has served as a consultant to international organizations and INGOs such as International Alert, Conciliation Resources, and the World Bank.