Lars-Erik Cederman (born 1963) is a Political Scientist and Professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zurich. His main fields of research are ethnic inequality and conflict, power-sharing, state formation and nationalism.

Cederman received an M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Uppsala in 1988 and an M.A. in International Relationsfrom the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1990, before obtaining his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1994. He held academic positions at the University of Michigan, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the University of Oxford, UCLA, and Harvard University. He became professor at ETH Zurich in 2003.

He was the director of the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS)] and a co-founder of the ETH Risk Center and the Competence Center for “Coping with Crises in Socio-Economic Systems.” Cederman also led the European Network of Conflict Research (ENCoRe), a Horizon 2020 program that brought together researchers and policy makers for the purpose of analysing and predicting the outbreak and trajectories of conflict processes around the world.

In 1998, Cederman received the Edgar S. Furniss Award for his monograph “Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve”. Cederman was twice granted the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review in 2011 for the co-authored article “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethno-Nationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison”, and in 2001 for the article “Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Collective Learning Process.”

The GROWup Project,which serves as the main outlet for data generated by Cederman's research group, was honoured as the “best data contribution to the study of any and all forms of political conflict” by the American Political Science Association, which awarded it with the J. David Singer Data Innovation Award in 2015

In 2018, Cederman was awarded the Marcel Benoist Swiss Science Prize for his work on political peace-building and the inclusion of ethnic minorities.