Visiting Researchers

The GIC network  is currently looking for new visiting researchers to stay at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of  Ghent University. Check out the call. 

 

Currently visiting

Donnah Atwagala

Pabel Lopez

Deborah Delgado

Deborah Delgado Pugley is Professor and Researcher of Sociology at PUCP.  Her research focus on global environmental politics, sustainable development policies and environmental issues at the community level. Recent projects include the impact assessment of of oil spills in amazonian communities and local universities involvement in climate policies. She is interested in indigenous social movements, human and environmental rights, natural resources management, climate change policies related to forests (REDD) and development. She holds a PhD in Development Studies and Sociology at the Université Catholique de Louvain and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris.

Past visiting scholars and researchers

2019

Naomi Pendle

Dr Pendle is a Research Officer with the Conflict Research Programme in the Centre for Civil Society and with the Centre for Public Authority in International Development in the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. She recently completed her PhD in the International Development department with a thesis on law, landscape, prophecy and public authority in South Sudan.

2018

Godefroid Muzalia

Godefroid Muzalia is professor at the department of history- social science at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu and head of the research group for conflict and human security at the University Research Center of Kivu. During his research stay in Ghent he has worked on a article about the frontier zone of Ruzizi,  between Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC. This border area has been progressively transformed into a protected area for  rebel movements. The rise of local violence and the regional military pressure has created a context of neither peace nor war. The article argues that chronic insecurity in the Ruzizi plain is closely linked to a governance deficit displayed by illegitimate authorities or perceived as such. This implies that the search for  lasting solutions requires a regional approach calling for both: durable solutions to internal and cyclical conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi (to break the Conflict-Refugee-Militia-War conflict circle in eastern DRC) and taking into account the perspectives suggested by a human security approach as articulated by Mary Kaldor. This could foster a real process of regional integration from below.

Daniel Komakech

Dr. Daniel Komakech, Ph.D., lectures at the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, Gulu University, Uganda of which he was the former Director. His areas of research interests are; peace epistemology, migrations and securitization, political ecology, and urban ecology. His major publications are in the areas of transitional Justice, traditional Justice and political philosophy.

Currently, he is a Visiting Research Fellow with the Department of Conflict and Development Studies University of Ghent. During his stay in Ghent he will co-author two articles together with Dr. Karen Büsher. The first one deals with post and persisting conflict and urban circulation: learning to detach from life course of 'husbanding. The second articles explores revolts against green militarisation in the Apaa land conflict.

Linus Karlsson

Linus Karlsson is a PhD student from the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). His research interests include agrarian change, property and authority, space, race and power, materiality and state formation. His PhD research is based in Lenje Chiefdom, rural Zambia, where he studies how ‘the state’ comes into being as a contested authority through various practices and performances of property making.

He is currently writing on an article titled ‘Boundaries of rule: struggles over land and legitimate authority in Munyama Forest, Lenje Chiefdom, Zambia’. The article examines how the spatialities and imaginaries of state authority are reshaped amid enduring struggles over land, and how these ‘boundary-struggles’ open up spaces for the renegotiation of political authority, belonging and rights.