Dr Michael Magcamit awarded Leverhulme International Fellowship

Dr Michael Magcamit from the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester was recently awarded a Leverhulme International Fellowship of £31,000 for his research project ‘Decolonising Japanese peacebuilding through the affective peace framework’ starting on 1 June 2024.

Leverhulme International Fellowships are awarded to established researchers to develop new knowledge, skills in one or more research centres outside of the UK.

Michael Magcamit’s research explores Japan’s role in peacebuilding in Southeast Asia which is home to some of the most virulent and enduring ethno-religious conflicts in the world. For its peace mission, Japan currently implements traditional Western-defined peacebuilding projects limited to resource mobilisation and economic revitalisation. Michael’s project maps out a different approach, focusing instead on an affective peace framework recognising the central place held by emotions, symbols, and perceptions in resolving conflicts.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Manchester and the Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences (GSHSS) in Japan. The team’s objectives are to design a decolonial affect-based peace framework and prepare a collaborative grant application to test the value of the framework. |

Commenting on the project, Dr Michael Magcamit said:

‘Achieving sustainable peace is impossible without explicitly recognizing and directly addressing the invisible, albeit powerful, emotive, symbolic, and perceptual residues simultaneously driving and produced by violent protracted conflicts.

The project aims to address this problem by exploring how an affect-based approach to peacebuilding can be developed by drawing on the outcomes from Japan’s extensive peace programs in Southeast Asia’s conflict-affected communities.’

You can read more about this project and Dr Michael Magcamit’s research on his profile.