Department of Development Studies

Ian Quick

You are viewing: Key information

Key information

Roles: Department of Development Studies PhD researcher
Department: Department of Development Studies
Qualifications: BCom (UNSW), LLB (UNSW), MPP (Harvard)
Email address: 703937@soas.ac.uk
Thesis title: How peacebuilding institutions develop and utilise climate-security futures
Internal Supervisors: Professor Jonathan Goodhand & Dr Andrew Newsham

Biography

Ian D. Quick is a management consultant with over 20 years of experience across multilateral institutions and in highly fragile contexts.

He has coordinated global strategic reviews on topics including future landscapes of armed conflict; “stabilisation” in protracted crises; and partnering for the development-humanitarian-peacebuilding “triple nexus”. In 2022 Ian started doctoral research on how peacebuilders articulate potential climate futures, and act on this knowledge in the present.

Previous publications include an oral history podcast on the ethics of international public service (onestepforward.fm); a monograph on multilateral peacebuilding in the DR Congo; and short-form articles on institutional learning within multilateral institutions. Past institutional affiliations include a broad cross-section of the UN system (UNICEF; UNDP; UN Missions in the DR Congo and Central African Republic; Secretariat); the Australian government; the World Bank; and transnational NGOs.

He is a qualified lawyer with under-graduate qualifications in finance and law (BCom LLB University of New South Wales), and also holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Research interests

My doctoral research explores how peacebuilders are engaging with (potential) climate futures. It is widely believed that climate change will transform conflict landscapes, and there is huge policy momentum for anticipatory action to meet such "climate-security" risks. But for institutions charged with conflict prevention, this poses complex adaptive challenges.

How can they responsibly forecast climate futures and their impact on politics? How do anticipatory initiatives deal with radical uncertainty at the level of global systems? And what kinds of new and re-designed partnerships does all this require?

The Climate / Security Futures Project is open research to develop the first systematic / inter-operable accounts of how peacebuilders are approaching these challenges. The approach is to build out the “life history” of climate-security initiatives with an extended case study of selected multilateral institutions.

In practice this means looking beyond the headline of policy mandates to understand how these institutions are (i) envisaging potential climate futures, and (ii) taking pre-emptive action in the present. It is a core assumption that climate action is "de-bounding" and cuts across sectors, institutional roles, disciplines, and geographic scales.

With this in mind we are working at the level of the complex transnational policy assemblages that bring together data, problem definitions, policy responses, financial resources, and political authority. At a theoretical level this sits at the intersection of a number of fields including political ecology; science & technology studies; peace & conflict studies; and policy ethnography.