Applicants may be citizens of any country and studying at colleges or universities in any country. They must be graduate students who will complete the writing of a dissertation within the award year.
Dissertations eligible for the grants are those relating to issues that interest the foundation, namely, those concerning violence and aggression in relation to social change, intergroup conflict, war, terrorism, crime, and family relationships, among other subjects. Dissertations with no relevance to understanding human violence and aggression will not be supported. Priority will also be given to areas and methodologies not receiving adequate attention and support from other funding sources.
These grants are made to PhD candidates who are entering the dissertation stage of graduate school. Usually, this means that fieldwork or other research is complete and writing has begun. If analysis and writing are not far enough along for an applicant to be confident that he will complete the dissertation within the year, he should not apply. In some disciplines, particularly experimental fields, research and writing can reasonably be expected to be completed within the same year, and in those cases it is appropriate to apply.