Fellowship Projects for Semester 2 2025-26. Student Fellowships provide the opportunity to get involved and gain first-hand experience in academic research. The fellowships are aimed at students from all backgrounds, bringing a diverse student body into contact with academic research.
We offer a maximum of 53 hours of Research Assistant work. Remuneration is €19 per hour on a freelance basis
Requirements:
1) being a second-year or higher UvA Bachelor’s Student (preferably from a programme at the FMG)
2) having EU or EEA citizenship. Unfortunately, UvA’s adherence to labour rules prevents the RPA Conflict & Society from hiring non-EU/EEA citizens. We regret the policy.
APPLY HERE
Deadline February 18th 2026
Moral Injury, War, and Suicidality: A Systematic Review
René Freichel, Reinout Wiers, Claudi Bockting | Psychiatry
This project proposes a systematic literature review on the relationship between moral injury in the context of war and armed conflict and suicidal ideation. While moral injury has received growing attention in clinical psychology, existing reviews primarily focus on racial, sexual, or institutional trauma, leaving combat-related moral injury and its association with suicidal thoughts and behaviours comparatively underexplored.
The student research assistant will support the project by conducting structured database searches (e.g., PsycINFO), screening abstracts and full texts based on predefined inclusion criteria, extracting key study characteristics, and organizing findings using reference management software. No prior experience with systematic reviews is required; training and close supervision will be provided. The project involves secondary analysis of published studies only and therefore does not raise ethical concerns.
Nonviolence Network (NVN)
Anne de Jong | Anthropology
The Nonviolence Network is a new initiative that aims to bring together scholars, activists, NGOs, and policymakers who work with or on nonviolent resistance.
The bachelor fellow will work with Anne de Jong (UvA) and Willemijn Born (VU) to set up an inaugural special issue. This issue aims to bring together state-of-the-art publications by scholars, policymakers, and activists. The student will 1) facilitate this multi-author endeavour, and 2) work with both Anne and Willemijn toward a co-authored contribution themselves.
“From every direction?” Tracing propagandist diffusion in Russian information networks during the 2022-invasion of Ukraine
Henrik Pröpper, dr. Bos, dr. Hameleers, dr. Noordenbos, and dr. Hop | Communication Science
For the Propagandist Diffusion Project, we are looking for research assistants who can assist us with a manual content analysis; specifically, we will be exploring Russian narratives surrounding the invasion of Ukraine. Consistent, high-quality, and culturally sensitive human annotations are the foundation for reliable computational analyses of language, and we need your help to make this happen!
You will work with real-world texts for annotation (i.e. labelling of themes/topics in discourse) and quality assessment alongside other research assistants. For these tasks you will receive training, which means you will be equipped with knowledge and skills on the intersection of political communication research, moral psychology, and conflict-studies.
Your main responsibilities will include:
· Testing and refinement of the codebook
· Manual content analysis of real-world texts
· Quality assurance of LLM based annotations
Candidate profile:
We’re looking for candidates with an analytical, systematic, and cooperative mindset with an interest in language analysis. Ideally, you are:
· A student in social sciences or humanities
· Proficient in Russian, both written and spoken
· Experience or affinity with systematic manual content analysis
· Familiar with the (historical) context of the Russia/Ukraine war
We offer a position in an ambitious project on a topic of great societal relevance. For information about the position, you can send an email to Henrik Pröpper (h.y.l.propper@uva.nl).
Violence before the Vote: Structuring Electoral Competition in Colombia
Sebastián Pantoja Barrios, PhD and Noyonika Das, PhD | Political Science
We, Noyonika Das and Sebastián Pantoja-Barrios are doctoral researchers currently working on a project aimed at estimating how violence against opposition candidates and local leaders affects voter turnout and electoral contestation in Colombia’s 2019 and 2023 municipal elections.
For this project, we require one research assistant to support the classification of candidates and local leaders who were victimised between 2016 and 2023, based on their opposition or loyalty to local incumbents.
The research assistant should have the following skills:
· Knowledge of Spanish language
· Basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel
· Experience coding qualitative data. Experience coding event violence data (e.g., ACLED, HDX) is desirable but not mandatory.
· Knowledge about Colombian politics is desirable but not mandatory.
The specific tasks of the research assistant will include:
1. Identifying and coding the political party or faction affiliation of incumbents (mayors) in 577 Colombian municipalities where at least one event of political violence occurred between 2016 and 2023, according to public data from the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE, by its acronym in Spanish).
2. Coding the political party affiliation of the 3,967 victims of political violence recorded between 2016 and 2023, as identified in the same data source. We will provide the codebook and the specific instructions to carry out this codification.
3. Comparing the political party affiliations of local incumbents and victims, and classifying the latter as: (i) strongly opposed, (ii) weakly opposed, (iii) neutral, (iv) weakly loyal, or (v) strongly loyal to the local incumbents. We will provide the specific criteria to carry out this classification based on the political party affiliations of incumbents and victims.
4. Identifying and coding the perpetrators and reasons of the violence events reported by ACLED database during two electoral periods in Colombia (2019 and 2023). This includes the coding of the event notes compiled in the ACLED database and the building of new variables for the identification of perpetrators of each violence events, following a codebook provided by us.
As project leaders, we will provide the research assistant with all the necessary information regarding the purpose of the project and the political context in Colombia, clearly explain and supervise the coding process, and provide continuous and comprehensive feedback throughout the research period. Substantively, we also expect that the research assistant will contribute a valuable third perspective on the research design and variable operationalization, which may help refine our methodological approach and the empirical scope of the overall project. The research assistant will gain hands-on experience with political violence datasets, party system classification in a violent context, and supervised qualitative–quantitative coding procedures.
For additional information or questions please contact: n.das@uva.nl or s.d.pantoja.barrios@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Bonfires tradition
Laurens Bakker | Anthropology
Two months ago, I started a collaboration with the Hague History Museum and two photographers working on the bonfires tradition in Scheveningen and Duindorp, both parts of Den Haag.…and then it turned out that Amsterdam has a similar bonfire in Floradorp but, contrary to The Hague, considers it a danger and seeks to forbid it. We will incorporate Floradorp as a comparative case and conduct interviews and policy research, but would greatly benefit from a student assistant to help with archival and literature research.
For the student, we offer the opportunity to gain experience working in a larger research project and as part of a team. If the student likes, they are welcome to join in interviews and field research as well, besides working on our primary need for archival research. An archivist from The Hague municipal archives is willing to provide a brief introduction for the student to carrying out such research. The project will result in publications as well as an exhibition in The Hague History Museum.
Peacebuilding through education.
Line Kuppens | Conflict Studies
To foster peacebuilding through education, teachers need to feel confident and competent in engaging critically and constructively with multiple perspectives on conflict, while also managing potentially heated classroom discussions. In ‘Teaching peace’, I explore how self-reflection can enhance Dutch and Kenyan secondary school teachers’ confidence and competence to teach about violence and conflict in the classroom, focusing respectively on the genocide in Gaza and the post-election violence in Kenya. Research assistance would consist of supporting the organization of relevant workshops in the Dutch context, and support in the analysis of data (coding of transcripts), for which the student is asked to become acquainted with the so-called conflict history education framework (Kuppens & Nfundiko, 2025).
Impact of Substance Use on Health, and Exposure to Violence
Ayse Nur Karkin | Forensic Child and Youth Care
Substance use affects not only individuals but also their families, communities, and society as a whole. It can affect physical and mental well-being, social relationships, educational and occupational trajectories, and perceptions of safety. Understanding substance use within its broader social context is therefore essential for informing research, prevention, and policy responses.
This project examines substance use, including alcohol, through multiple interconnected subprojects. For example, one subproject investigates how media coverage influences perceptions and intentions related to substance use. Another explores the relationship between substance use and experiences of violence in the context of obtaining substances. The research assistant will be involved in one or more of these subprojects, support the literature review, and assist with online and in-person data collection. Specific tasks and areas of focus will be determined during the initial project meetings.
Annotating graffiti on Google Street View images
Wim Bernasco, Nanne van Noord | Human Geography, Planning + Informatics Institute
Simultaneously labelled as art, vandalism and political engagement, graffiti is a contested urban phenomenon. As part of a larger project that maps graffiti in the Netherlands, we will develop a computer vision algorithm for automatically detecting graffiti on digital images of public places taken from Google Street View. Developing this algorithm requires annotated images: images on which human observers have determined whether and where graffiti is present. Graffiti annotation is the main task of the prospective student assistants (RAs). For verifying interrater reliability, at least two RAs are needed. Each RA will work on the project at least 32 and at most 50 hours in total (including in-house training). Other than being visually able, there are no specific requirements. Annotating is an important but somewhat repetitive task with limited variation. To prevent fatigue and maintain engagement, RAs will get sufficient off-screen time to relax and perform other activities.
Participation as Conflict in Amsterdam.
Nanke Verloo | Human Geography, Planning
This project studies the conflicts emerging from participatory urban development strategies. While citizen participation aims at inclusion, participatory policy and planning often exclude the very citizens they seek to include. The municipality of Amsterdam is aware of this dilemma and therefore provides us with unique access to the behind-the-scenes world of the participatory process.
In this research project, we ethnographically follow both civil servants and citizens in their practices and experiences of participatory processes in Amsterdam Noord, South-East, the City Centre, and New West. We observe participatory meetings and conduct interviews with civil servants and citizens to gain insights into their conflicting perspectives on the future of Amsterdam. Simultaneously, we conduct a citywide survey at participatory meetings in Amsterdam.
Student Research Assistants in this project will support researchers by conducting interviews, transcribing them, and observing participatory meetings. They will also play a significant role in attending participatory meetings to conduct survey research among participants. Students are therefore required to be flexible, as these events often take place in the evening. You will be supervised by Nanke Verloo and Bart Groen from the Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies.