Professor Jeremy Lind is a development geographer of the Horn of Africa, focussing on conflict, violence and livelihoods, particularly in pastoralist areas. He was co-leader of the Resource Politics and Environmental Change cluster at IDS from 2015-2018.
Jeremy has over 20 years of academic research, advisory work and project management experience, working with a range of government and non-governmental actors at the national and sub-national levels in the Horn of Africa as well as scholars and advocates in the region. Currently he is part of the leadership team for the Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) programme funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. He is also leading a qualitative-participatory research team undertaking NERC-funded research in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania on nature-based solutions to enhance climate resilience.
His recent research critically examined the local-level dynamics around land and resource-based investments in dryland eastern Africa. This was undertaken in his role as PI of the UK Research Councils-funded Seeing Conflict at the Margins project, which used interdisciplinary methods to examine conflicts around geothermal and wind power developments in Kenya. He was also editor of Land, Investment and Politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s Pastoral Drylands (James Currey, 2020).
Previously, he convened the Addressing and Mitigating Violence programme as part of the IDS DFID Accountable Grant, leading to the publication of a collection of cases on vernacular security at the insurgent margins.
Jeremy’s advisory experience focusses on livelihoods and social protection, including leading the qualitative research (2012-2021) for the Donor Coordination Team-commissioned performance evaluation of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). He has completed other advisory work for the World Bank, Irish Aid, Overseas Development Institute, Oxfam GB, Christian Aid, Medicines Sans Frontieres-UK, the BBC World Service, and the British-Irish Afghanistan Agencies Group.
At IDS, Jeremy convenes and lectures across a range of MA modules including Debating Poverty and Vulnerability, Poverty Violence and Conflict, and Climate Change and Development. He was supervisor of several PhD students who successfully completed their dissertation research under the Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience (PASTRES) research programme funded by the European Research Council.
Prior to joining IDS in 2009, Jeremy was Lecturer of Human Geography at the University of Sussex, where he taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on environment, development and conflict. Previously he was Research Officer at the London School of Economics, where he researched changing approaches to aid and civil society in the post-9/11 context. The research was published in a co-authored book on Counter-Terrorism, Aid and Civil Society: Before and After the War on Terror (Palgrave, 2009), as well as a co-edited volume on Civil Society Under Strain: The War on Terror Regime, Civil Society and Aid Post-9/11 (Kumarian Press, 2009).
