Prof. Oliver Richmond is a leading scholar in the field of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies. He is founder of the MA in Peace and Conflict Studies and contributes to its core modules in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. In 2019, he received an Eminent Scholar Award from the International Studies Association. He has worked with international actors, especially the UN, and civil society organisations in several conflict-affected areas around the world, and has also conducted fieldwork on local, state, and international problems of peacebuilding in Timor Leste, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Colombia.

Among his publications are his recent monographs The Grand Design: Peace in the 21^st Century (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Peace in International Relations (Routledge, 2020- 2nd Ed.), Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (Yale University Press, 2014). He also published a Very Short Introduction to Peace (Oxford University Press,  2014), which offers an overview of the development of related concepts, theory and practices.

He is currently leading several global research projects: including the AHRC-project ‘ The Art of Peace’ (with civil society, arts partners in Lebanon, Bosnia, South Africa, and Colombia); the African Research Universities Alliance -UK Research Partnership Programme for Capacity Building in Post-conflict Societies (including universities from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somaliland/ Somalia, and Zimbabwe);  and the Global Challenges Research Fund-project ‘Blockages to Peace’ (including civil society organisations in Colombia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka). He is also a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Tubingen in Germany, Coimbra in Portugal, and Dublin City, Ireland.

He has long been interested in critical approaches to international theory, concepts of peace and their implicit usages in IR theory, and related practices of the international system (see his earlier book which was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, The Transformation of Peace, Palgrave, 2005). His primary area of expertise is in peace and conflict theory, and in particular its inter-linkages with IR theory. His recent work examines the evolution of the different strategies for maintaining international order in contemporary history and engages with new questions about peace and war raised in the digital era. His previous work was on peace formation and its relation to state formation, statebuilding, and peacebuilding This area of interest grew out of his work on local and everyday forms of critical agency and resistance, and their role in constructing hybrid or post-liberal forms of peace and states (see A Post-Liberal Peace, Routledge, 2011), as well as earlier conflict resolution and conflict management debates in IR, including international mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding (see Maintaining Order, Making Peace, Macmillan, 2002).

He co-edits a Palgrave Book Series called Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, which seeks to provide a forum for the development of new and alternative approaches for understanding the dynamics of conflict and of the construction of peace: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14500

He is co-editor of the journal "Peacebuilding": https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpcb20/current

He is also co-editor of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies

He is also a member of the editorial boards of several key journals, and is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.