The European Peace Research Association (EuPRA) was initiated at a meeting in Groningen on 16 December 1988 and the decision to formally constitute it as a regional association of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) was made at the IPRA General Conference in Groningen on 5 July 1990. EuPRA was legally constituted in the Federal Republic of Germany on 1 December 1990. The seat of the Association is Bonn.
In the 1990s, EuPRA was led by former presidents Hakan Wiberg (Sweden) and Judit Balazs (Hungary) whereas in the new millennium Unto Vesa (Finland) between 2000-2004, Riikka Kuusisto (Finland) between 2004-2008 and Nesrin Kenar (Turkey) between 2008-2012 served as Presidents of EuPRA. Karlheinz Koppe (Germany) and Attila Fabian (Hungary) served as former secretaries during the last two decades.
To this day EuPRA has had 11 international conferences. The inaugural conference, entitled Change and Continuity in European Peace Research was held in Florence (Italy) in November 1991. The second and the third conferences took place in Budapest (Hungary) in 1993 and in Twente (The Netherlands) in 1998 respectively. For the fourth conference, the European peace research community travelled to Schlaining (Austria) in 2002 to talk about Europe as a Peaceful Power. In 2007, the fifth conference on Challenges of Democracy and Peace in Europe was organized in Sakarya (Turkey), followed by the sixth conference entitled Bridging Divides: European Peace Architecture of Integration and Engagement in Tirana (Albania) in 2009. In 2011, EuPRA met in Tampere to discuss issues On Europe and the World. The EuPRA conference on Building Positive Peace in Europe and Its Neighborhood took place in Famagusta (North Cyprus) in 2013. In 2015, we had a conference in Tromsø, Norway on The Framing of Europe: Peace Perspectives on Europe’s Future. The 2017 conference on Peace and Conflict Studies from the Margins to the Center took place in Schwerte, Germany. The most recent conference was on Peace in Difficult Times: Challenges Europe and the World Face and took place in 2019 in Catania, Italy.
The 12th and the upcoming conference of EuPRA will be held in Tampere, Finland on 1-4 June 2022. The topic of the conference is Empowering Peace: The role of civil society in peacebuilding and conflict transformation.