Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War
Funder: Leverhulme Trust
Principal Investigator: Professor Zoe Trodd
Duration: 2025-2035
Academics from the School of Politics and International Relations will play a key role in the new Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.
The new centre is a collaborative initiative between the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. It will receive up to £10 million in funding over the next ten years.
University of Nottingham project lead Professor Zoe Trodd (Director of the Rights Lab and Professor of Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking in the School of Politics and International Relations) stated: “The relationships between modern slavery and war are poorly understood, creating gaps in understanding that mean governments, international institutions, and humanitarian actors are ill-prepared to prevent or respond to slavery in war and its deep, long-lasting impacts.”
Professor Trodd continued: “One of the Centre’s aims is to transform early warning of slavery practices within shifting conflict dynamics – bringing new analytical approaches to a 5,000-year-old problem so that we can transform its future.”
In addition to Professor Trodd, the new Centre includes contributions from five academics from the School of Politics and International Relations as co-investigators:
The Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War will build on the team’s foundational work to date, which demonstrates that nearly 90% of recent armed conflicts have involved some form of slavery. In a world facing proliferating conflicts, the Centre will reshape knowledge of how slavery in war can be forecasted and tackled by drawing on novel analytical methods that bridge the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences, including forecasting techniques and survivors’ own voices. In doing so, the Centre will revolutionise how we think about both slavery and war, uncovering the dynamics by which slavery takes root and flourishes in war, how actors in and around conflict zones use slavery strategically and tactically, and how slavery influences the course, conduct, and consequences of conflicts.