In the last two decades, research on peace and conflict has undergone its ‘local turn’. The global conflict environment changed rapidly after the end of the Cold War as traditional inter-state conflicts vanished, while the occurrence and intensity of intra-state conflicts rapidly increased. Many scholars, both from the quantitative and the qualitative camp, have responded to the changing nature of violent conflict by shifting their focus from the once dominant state-level towards the largely understudied local-level.