Kazuhiro Obayashi is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Graduate School of Law at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Changing Character of War (CCW) at Pembroke College. He was previously a visiting researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) in 2007 and 2012, and a consultant for the World Bank in 2006-2007.
Obayashi’s research focuses on political violence, civil war, organization of rebel group, counterinsurgency, and peacebuilding. He is the author of Rebel Recruitment and Information Problems (Routledge, 2017), which explores the conditions under which rebel groups tend to rely more on coercion or inducement for recruitment. The book also addresses themes such as desertion, counterinsurgency and civil war termination, with case studies of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. He has also conducted research and written on conflicts and peacebuilding in countries such as Nigeria, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Uganda, employing qualitative and quantitative methods. As a visiting fellow at the CCW, he is conducting research on the state’s choice of counterinsurgency techniques that are intended to exploit the agency problems inside rebel groups.
Obayashi received his PhD in political science from the George Washington University, and MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago.
