Department of Development Studies

Professor Jonathan Goodhand

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Key information

Roles: Department of Development Studies Professor in Conflict and Development Studies Centre for the Study of Illicit Economies, Violence and Development Director Centre of Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus Academic Staff SOAS South Asia Institute Academic Staff Centre on Conflict, Rights and Justice Member Centre for the Study of Pakistan Academic Staff
Department: Department of Development Studies
Qualifications: BA, PGCE (Birmingham), MSc, PhD (Manchester)
Building: Russell Square: College Buildings
Office: 258
Email address: jg27@soas.ac.uk
Telephone number: +44 (0)20 7898 4483

Biography

Jonathan Goodhand is a Professor of Conflict and Development Studies in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London.

He is the Director of CIVAD. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne and an FCDO/UKRI Senior Research Fellow (War, Conflict, Stabilisation).

Before becoming an academic he worked for several years with NGOs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Central Asia and has retained an interest in better understanding how communities, states and societies respond to conflict, fragility and processes of transition.

His research focuses on the political economy of armed conflict, war economies and post war transitions. In recent years his work has increasingly focused on borderland regions and their central role in shaping the dynamics of conflict, statebuilding, post war stabilisation and development. Much of his research has focused on South and Central Asia, but he also has broader comparative experience He has led several large research projects and published extensively on these issues including an ESRC project on ‘Borderlands, brokers and peacebuilding’ (2014 – 2017) in Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a UKRI/GCRF project ‘Drugs and (dis)order: building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war’ (2018 – 2022) which studied drug economies and post war transitions in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar.

He established CIVAD as a legacy of this project, which provides a hub for researchers exploring, the relationships between illicit economies, political (dis)order and development, from different disciplinary and methodological standpoints. Current research programmes include comparative work on the paramilitary-organised crime nexus and a study of illicit resource corridors linking borderlands to metropoles.

His research has always aimed to be policy relevant and impactful. He has also worked with, and advised, policy makers on conflict, security and peacebuilding related issues including FCDO, the World Bank, ILO, NORAD and a range of NGOs. This has included supporting DFID’s work on Strategic Conflict Assessment, evaluating the Norwegian role in the Sri Lankan peace process for NORAD, and co-leading a multi-country review of post war stabilisation and elite bargaining processes for the UK Stabilisation Unit.