Kristine Helskog

I am a DPhil student in politics at Merton College, supervised by Professor Robin Harding and Professor Inken von Borzyskowski. My research explores why non-state armed groups attack educational infrastructure, students/pupils and educational personnel in intrastate conflict.

Interests and experience

My broader research focuses on children and armed conflict, insurgency decision-making, and the human consequences of war. I am particularly interested in how conflicts affect children's education and life opportunities, and why conflicts target education. I combine my background in political science and pedagogy with perspectives from other disciplines. I specialise in computational methods and geospatial analysis, with a regional focus on the developing world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa.

Before Oxford, I graduated from the University of Oslo, where I earned a master's degree in political science and two bachelor's degrees in political science and pedagogy. I also worked at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) for 3.5 years as a research assistant, conducting research on the causes and consequences of armed conflict. Additionally, I am a co-author and developer of PRIO-GRID 3.0, a newly developed, open-source R package that provides researchers with accessible, standardised grid-cell tools to study spatial dynamics in peace and conflict studies.

Themes and topics

• Conflict-related attacks on education
• Children and armed conflict
• Decision-making in insurgency
• Human and socioeconomic consequences of war

Methods

• GIS and spatial data analysis
• Quantitative methods and spatial statistics
• Survey and text data
• Machine learning approaches to data collection