The Yale Center for International and Area Studies this week launched a new interdisciplinary research and teaching program that combines international relations and comparative politics.

The Program on Order, Conflict and Violence will offer residential research graduate fellowships and will sponsor a series of lectures, seminars, workshops and conferences on issues of political order, state formation, polarization, group conflict and violence. Political Science professor Stathis Kalyvas, who has been appointed to direct the program, said it aims to encourage collaboration between students and professors from multiple disciplines.

“The idea is the need to cross interdisciplinary lines and use a variety of tools as a way to institutionalize some of the research findings,” Kalyvas said Monday. “One of the goals is to bring in people who under normal conditions wouldn’t speak to each other and give them an opportunity to interact.”

This new program is one of 25 regional councils, programs and centers that fall under the auspices of YCIAS, the University’s principal international teaching and research institution. Like these other councils and programs, the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence will serve as a home base for corresponding academic study.

YCIAS Director Gustav Ranis said in a news release that YCIAS is pleased to add the new program.

“We are enthusiastic about the research that will emerge,” Ranis said. “In today’s world, it is more important than ever to study the myriad issues pertaining to order, and particularly, conflict and violence.”

Kalyvas said the program is reviewing more than 120 applications for two graduate research and teaching fellowships at the center for this fall. The fellows will each teach one undergraduate seminar course next year in the International Studies Program and possibly the Political Science Department.

“There’s clearly a lot of interest,” Ka lyvas said. “The idea would be to set up an agenda that reflects and supports the research that is done here.”

The program will currently operate on existing University funds and has not announced its budget for the first year, Kalyvas said.

“As soon as the program is built up, we’ll be looking for outside money as well,” Kalyvas said, adding that the program plans to apply eventually for private research grants to sponsor its activities.

Political Science professors Keith Darden and Nicholas Sambanis are affiliated with the program, but Kalyvas said he expects to add more professors as the program develops.

Darden said the program provides “an institutional home” for him to conduct specialized research.

“It’s a very nice niche between comparative politics and international relations, which is where I fall in the discipline and the department,” Darden said. “It’s consistent with the interests of a lot of the faculty here, looking at the international end and domestic politics within a single program.”

The Program on Order, Conflict and Violence launched a new Web site this week and will host an inaugural conference later this spring. The conference will unite academics in multiple disciplines to focus on several dimensions of human conflict.