Lives and Violence

Speaker: Mareike Schomerus, Busara Center, Nairobi and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI, London

Chair: Dr Christine Cheng, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, King's College London

Violent conflict lingers in many ways after it ends - it affects people’s abilities to trust, collaborate and plan for the future. It entrenches or breaks structures and relationships. It shows who is vulnerable and who is powerful.

The many layers of conflict mean recovery after violence also happens as many different, but parallel phenomena (each with their own rules and dynamics). But post-conflict development is not the automatic end result; in fact many presumed programmes and interventions to make people’s lives after conflict better do not work: economic growth programmes, migration, entrepreneurship, access to credit, improved security and services do not automatically represent improved stability in people’s lives, secure livelihoods, or better prospects. In fact, in a post conflict environment, the necessary forces of recovery and stabilization work in contradiction with each other, which is one reason why life is simply not getting better.

Using research from ten years of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC)—conducted in nine countries between 2011 and 2020—this session will explore some principles that require a benevolent discourse on how to improve development programmes in conflict contexts.

Bio:

Dr Mareike Schomerus is Vice President at the Busara Center in Nairobi and the Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI in London. Her most recent publications are Secessionism in African Politics: Aspiration, Grievance, Performance, Disenchantment, edited with Pierre Englebert and Lotje de Vries (Palgrave 2019) and the forthcoming The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and peacemaking in Africa (CUP, 2021) and Lives and Violence (revised) I.B.Tauris/ Bloomsbury forthcoming).

Please register via Zoom, all registered attendees will receive an email with Zoom access information.

This event will be recorded.