Since the end of the Cold War, security and development concerns have been increasingly interlinked. Governments and international institutions have stated that they have become increasingly aware of the need to integrate security and development programmes in policy interventions in post-conflict situations and in their relations with the growing category of failed and potentially ‘failing’ states. To better understand the linking of security and development concerns the PhD project will investigate the dynamics of specific security-development interventions in Africa and the creation of solutions in the context of the security-development nexus focusing on sectors such as governance, security sector, and rule of law.
The research will ethnographically explore a security-development intervention from at least three perspectives: the local population, the implementing organisation, state institutions and analyse the multifaceted relationship between development interventions and security in theory and practice. It is expected that the PhD project critically will question the conceptual and empirical boundary between security and developmental interventions and investigate what policy implications that flow from it.
The researcher will carry out 3 months placement during fieldwork with a leading development organisation. The researcher will be based at Aarhus University and will spend 6 months at the University of Edinburgh.
Applicants are invited to send a proposal, which elaborates on the project described above.
Please write a maximum of 5 A4 pages of 2400 characters per page (total 12.000 characters) and use the following structure in your proposal:
Please include a separate reference list with the up-to-date literature on the chosen topic (max 2 A4 pages).