The Journey to Paris
When I stepped off the train at Gare du Nord on a sunny May morning, I was not entirely sure what to expect. I had spent the past year buried in fieldwork data from Varanasi, India, trying to make sense of what happens to urban communities when temperatures rise and water levels drop. Now, barely two weeks stretched ahead of me in Paris, a city I had visited as a tourist but never as a researcher. By the time I left, espresso-fueled and full of new ideas, I knew this short adventure had changed the trajectory of my work.
My name is Dominik Juling, and I am an incoming PhD student in Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University. I hold master's degrees in Conflict Studies and in Environmental Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Yale, and my research sits at an uncomfortable intersection: climate change, peace, conflict, and security. As a young person living in a world that seems to be spinning out of control, the issues of climate change and peace are particularly close to my heart. I have spent years asking questions that do not have easy answers, and Paris offered me the space to ask them alongside others who refuse easy answers, too.
Will We See More Conflict in a Warming World?
This is the question that drives my research. The dominant narrative is stark: climate change leads to resource scarcity, scarcity leads to competition, competition leads to violence. Politicians, military leaders, and international institutions repeat this causal chain with remarkable consistency. But when I spent three months conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Varanasi during extreme weather phenomena, I found something different. I found increased cooperation in the face of scarcity. I found interfaith networks actively maintained across religious lines. I found grievances directed at the state, not at neighbors. The climate conflict I had been looking for never materialized.
This puzzle, the gap between what dominant frameworks predict and what actually happens on the ground, is what I brought to Paris.
Why Sciences Po?
Sciences Po's Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS) turned out to be the perfect, albeit temporary, home for these questions. Climate vulnerability is never evenly distributed. Who suffers when temperatures rise? Whose neighborhood floods? Whose water supply doesn´t get enough maintenance? These are questions of inequality, spatial politics, and state power. My host at CRIS, Professor Dr. Ankit Sikarwar, understood this immediately. His own work on urban climate risks and demography in South Asia resonated deeply with my findings from Varanasi.
Over two intense weeks, I met with scholars from across the university: political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, urban geographers, international relations scholars, and current PhD students grappling with similar puzzles in different contexts. We debated methodology over coffee. We argued about causality over lunch. And slowly, a project began to take shape: a comparative study examining which urban sustainability interventions support peace and which inadvertently generate grievances and conflict in certain contexts. The cases will span multiple cities; the questions will cut across disciplines. None of it would have happened without those conversations in seminar rooms and cafés across the Southern side of the Seine.
Gratitude for the Opportunity and My Mentors
None of this would have been possible without the COST Action CA23129 - Peace Research Community Europe (PEACE). For those unfamiliar, the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Association funds networking and collaboration across European research communities. The STSM, or Short-Term Scientific Mission, is one of its most valuable instruments. It provides researchers like me with the resources to visit partner institutions in member states, build relationships, and kickstart collaborative projects that would otherwise never get off the ground. Simple in theory, transformative in practice.
I am deeply grateful to my COST mentor, Dr. Elise Machline from the Arava Institute, who has guided my thinking since I was selected for the PEACE Action's NextGen program. Her ability to see connections across disparate fields has shaped how I approach my own work. And I owe enormous thanks to Professor Sikarwar for hosting me at CRIS, opening doors, making introductions, and treating my questions with the seriousness they needed.
The COST system works because it understands something important: research is relational. Ideas do not develop in isolation. They develop through friction, conversation, disagreement, and the slow building of trust. An STSM is not just a research trip; it is an investment in the relationships that make good research possible. For someone preparing for a PhD, there is no better preparation than learning to navigate new intellectual communities, to listen carefully, and to find common ground with scholars whose methods and assumptions differ from or often very much align with your own.
Looking Ahead
As I write this, back home and already missing Parisian espresso and lively corner restaurants, I am thinking about the friends I made. The PhD students who shared their struggles and strategies. The professors who took time for a visiting researcher whom they had never met. The NextGen cohort scattered across Europe, all wrestling with questions about how to build peace in turbulent times. We will stay in touch. We will read each other's drafts. We will meet again at conferences and workshops, picking up conversations where we left off.
The collaborative project we assembled at Sciences Po is already taking its first steps. A publication will emerge, co-authored across institutions and countries, examining urban sustainability interventions through the lens of peace and conflict. It will not provide final answers. But it will ask better questions, grounded in local realities rather than abstract models.
Two weeks is not a long time. But sometimes, two weeks is exactly long enough to change everything.
Dominik Julling is a NextGen member of the COST Action CA23129 (PEACE) and an incoming PhD student in Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University. His first book, Rethinking Climate Security from Below: Looking for the Climate Conflict in Varanasi, India, is forthcoming in late 2026.