Janina Pawelz conducts research on political, collective and urban violence, social peace and radicalisation with a special focus on youth, youth violence and non-violent conflict transformation.Currently she works on radicalization in the Salafist and extreme right spectrum. Her main focus is on researching these phenomena in social media. Further research interests in the field of peace and security are dynamics of violence, gangs and transformation processes of violent groups as well as forms of legitimacy and control of armed actors and their claim to power and exercise of power from a comparative perspective. For her doctoral thesis on the transformation of violent groups, she spent six months conducting field research in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean where she interviewed members of violent groups. She is interested in empirical methods, field research, development cooperation and monitoring&evaluation.