A little bit about the origins of EuPRA
The European Peace Research Association (EuPRA) was initiated at a meeting in Groningen on 16 December 1988 and the decision to formally constitute it as a regional association of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) was made at the IPRA General Conference in Groningen on 5 July 1990. EuPRA was legally constituted in the Federal Republic of Germany on 1 December 1990. The seat of the Association is located in Tampere, Finland.
In the 1990s, EuPRA was led by former presidents Hakan Wiberg (Sweden) and Judit Balazs (Hungary), whereas in the new millennium Unto Vesa (Finland) between 2000-2004, Riikka Kuusisto (Finland) between 2004-2008 and Nesrin Kenar (Turkey) between 2008-2012 served as Presidents of EuPRA. The former President was Daniela Irrera. In 2022, at the EuPRA Conference in Tampere, Ilaria Tucci was elected President by the EuPRA members. Karlheinz Koppe (Germany) and Attila Fabian (Hungary) were former secretaries during the last two decades.
To this day EuPRA has had 12 international conferences. The inaugural conference, Change and Continuity in European Peace Research, was held in Florence (Italy) in November 1991. The second and third conferences took place in Budapest (Hungary) in 1993 and Twente (The Netherlands) in 1998, respectively. For the fourth conference, the European peace research community travelled to Schlaining (Austria) in 2002 to discuss Europe as a Peaceful Power. In 2007, the fifth conference on Challenges of Democracy and Peace in Europe was organized in Sakarya (Turkey), followed by the sixth conference entitled Bridging Divides: European Peace Architecture of Integration and Engagement in Tirana (Albania) in 2009. In 2011, EuPRA met in Tampere to discuss issues On Europe and the World. The EuPRA conference on Building Positive Peace in Europe and Its Neighborhood occurred in Famagusta (North Cyprus) in 2013. In 2015, we had a conference in Tromsø, Norway, on The Framing of Europe: Peace Perspectives on Europe’s Future. The 2017 conference on Peace and Conflict Studies from the Margins to the Center took place in Schwerte, Germany. The most recent conference was on Peace in Difficult Times: Challenges Europe and the World Face and took place in 2019 in Catania, Italy.
The 12th conference of EuPRA was held in Tampere, Finland, from 1 to 4 June 2022. The conference's topic was Empowering Peace: The role of civil society in peacebuilding and conflict transformation.