Gauthier Marchais is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. His research centres on the effects of violent conflict on societies, with a particular focus on education. He is part of the Governance Cluster at IDS.
Gauthier’s research combines several disciplinary approaches to study the impact of violent conflict and intersecting crises on societies. At IDS, he convenes two MA teaching modules on conflict and development, and supervises MA and PhD theses.
Gauthier’s research focuses on education in crisis and conflict-affected contexts. At IDS, he led the REALISE and BRICE interdisciplinary research projects, which focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger. The main outputs can be found in this report on teacher wellbeing in conflict-affected contexts (see summary), an edited book on education in crisis, an article on the causes of violence against teachers (forthcoming), and an article on the impact of COVID-19 on education systems in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gauthier is currently the co-Principal Investigator (with Samuel Matabishi, ISP Bukavu) of an IDRC-KIX funded project on scaling-up a teacher training module in the DRC.
Gauthier is interested in the wider question of social and institutional transformation during war. He has worked on: 1) the communal dynamics of armed mobilization and social transformation (through his PhD at LSE, see this working paper on the social origins of militias); 2) Historical continuities in violent conflict, see paper on taxation, stateness and armed groups in DRC, and working paper on wartime indirect rule), 3) the environmental impact of violent conflict, see Working Paper on the impact of armed groups on fishing sector in the Philippines, ESRC funded, led by Ana Maria Ibáñez, and article on conservation in violent frontiers; 4) methodologies to study violent conflict, for example on approaches to reporting violence.
Gauthier has also written about race in society and research. He published a book in French on whiteness in contemporary society, Le Deni Blanc: Penser autrement la question raciale, and wrote about race and contemporary academic research on the African continent, in an article, and blog. He also contributed to a documentary on this question, Congo Calling, directed by Stephan Hilpert, which won the audience prize at the Max Ophüls Preis film festival.
He is a scientific director at Marakuja Kivu Research, a non-profit organization specialized in research in conflict-affected areas, based in Goma, DRC.
