Peace and Conflict Studies Editing and Proofreading Services

Calling an armed group a militia, an insurgency, a terrorist organisation, a resistance movement or a party to a conflict are five choices, and each one carries a position about legitimacy, about the state's status, and about what the group is entitled to. A paper that uses them interchangeably across forty pages has taken all five positions and defended none.

We edit what peace and conflict researchers write — conflict analyses and case studies, peacebuilding and mediation research, transitional justice work, fieldwork with affected communities and combatants, quantitative conflict data papers, policy analyses and reports for institutions, evaluation of peace interventions, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the terminology used for actors and events.

Naming is analytically consequential in this field, and the failure is a paper whose vocabulary shifts with the sentence. What you call a group, a territory, an event or a period is a claim, and the reader is entitled to know which claim is being made and why. We work through these so the terms used for each actor are chosen once, defined, and held consistently, since silent variation reads either as carelessness or as positioning; so the basis for a term is stated where it is contested — legal definition, self-designation, the usage of one party, or the author's own analytical category; so the same standard is applied to all parties, because using a legal register for one side and a moral one for the other is visible to every reader who belongs to either; so place names and territorial descriptions are handled explicitly, given that these are frequently the most contested words in the document; so events are described in terms that can be evidenced rather than characterised, as the characterisation is usually the thing under dispute; so the terminology used by participants is retained in quotation and distinguished from the author's; and so the paper states what its terminology is not intended to imply. Writing like this can be read by people on more than one side of the conflict.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, fieldwork material and the identities of participants. We are editors rather than conflict researchers, and we offer no view on any conflict, party or claim. What we can do is make your terminology consistent and its basis explicit.