Peace and Conflict Research is a young discipline at Uppsala University. The Department was established in 1971 to conduct research and offer courses in peace and conflict studies. Peace and conflict research is multidisciplinary and the Department recruites researchers from disciplines such as sociology, psychology and political science. The Dag Hammarskjöld chair of peace and conflict research – the first of its kind in Sweden – was created in 1985 and by that time the Department begun to develop complete educational programs.

The primary goal of research at the Department is to understand the causes and dynamics of peace and conflict. The Department has established itself as a key producer of cutting-edge research and a provider of high-quality data on conflict. The research conducted is mainly theory-based empirical enquiries, while some projects are policy-driven. A range of quantitative and qualitative methods is used, and several projects are multi-method.