From 22 July to 9 August, I will be teaching the Development and Conflict Summer School. It's three weeks of studying, discussion and presenting, in the heart of sunny London. I have done a quick Question & Answer session that gives a bit of background to my research and teaching at SOAS.
1) Could you tell us more about yourself and your areas of research?
All the research I have done has at its core this question of how conflict and development interact. I started off working on the question of who receives humanitarian assistance in contexts of conflict and why, carrying out research in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the area that is now South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I published that research in a book called “Not Breaking the Rules, Not Playing the Game” in 2006. I then turned to research more intensely in Congo, investigating how Congolese people conceptualise and pursue security in situations of unremitting structural and direct violence, and published my second book “Formal Peace and Informal War” in 2013. From my research in Congo I started to dig into research questions about other narratives – distinct from the mainstream – and how they present perspectives on, and resist, violence and conflict. This led to a book, “Cultural Resistance from Below” which is currently in print and investigates how resistance is communicated through the Afro-Brazilian art form of capoeira.2) Why did you decide to form the Development and Conflict summer course?
All of our teaching is research-led. At SOAS I convene a masters programme MSc Violence, Conflict and Development, and a MSc and BA module in Security. Violence and conflict are often perceived or presented as disruptions from otherwise peaceful processes of development, but something that is clear from my teaching and research is that different forms of conflict are persistent and ubiquitous and shape the way that development takes place. Understanding how conflict and development interact is fundamental to understanding how the world operates, how security is formulated and how power, identities and interests are formed. The Development and Conflict summer school provides the possibility of investigating these questions, and as they are fundamental, provides a base for analysis across a range of professional or academic contexts.You can read the rest of the blog here (and find a pic of me in Congo, with a life-jacket): https://
Details of the Summer School are here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/summerschool/subjects/development-and-conflict/
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