Dr Robert Gerwarth, UCD School of History & Archives
Dr Robert Gerwarth, UCD School of History & Archives, has been awarded a European Research Council personal grant of between €1.2m and €1.5m for a ground-breaking 4-year project on the transnational history of failed demobilization and paramilitary violence from Ireland through Europe and across the wider world after the Russian revolution and the end of the Great War.
This is the first time that such an award has been made to a humanities scholar in Ireland. It is also the largest EU research grant ever made for a humanities project in Ireland.
The Chair of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Maurice Bric puts Robert Gerwarth’s achievement in context. “The ERC award is the highest accolade which any scholar can achieve in the European Research Area. I congratulate Dr Gerwarth on his achievement. It is a testament to his originality as a humanities scholar and establishes him among the most elite of European academics. It is a great honour for him, for Ireland and for UCD".
The project entitled ‘Paramilitary violence, demobilization and the paths to peace in Europe and the wider world from 1917 to 1923’, builds on a substantial seed funding grant of €300,000 awarded to Dr Gerwarth by IRCHSS after a rigorous peer-review process last year. The grant will boost research activity at Dr Gerwarth’s Centre for War Studies at UCD and intensify collaboration with national and international partner institutions.
The European Research Council Independent Researcher Grants are the most competitive academic awards worldwide. They are designed to support internationally recognised research leaders from across the globe to undertake pioneering frontier research in Europe and to create new research centres of excellence.
Speaking about his work Dr Gerwarth explains that it takes a transnational approach to understand the often violent (and sometimes peaceful) global paths of transition from war to ‘peace’ during the period 1917 – 1923.
“The global transition from war to ‘peace’ between 1917 and 1923 was as often violent as it was peaceful. The impact of the Russian Revolution, the destruction of frontiers especially in Eastern Europe but also in the shatter zones of the Ottoman Empire created zones of limited statehood, often without order or definite government authority.
My research focuses on the eruption of violent paramilitary conflicts in the immediate aftermath of the Great War by looking at geographical zones of victory, defeat, and mutilated or ambivalent victories rather than the traditional national boundaries approach.”
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