Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict

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International engagement in situations of violent conflict—or in the presumed aftermath—sets these situations up for a never-ending violent path. This is a bold claim, but one that a decade of a major research consortium (the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium), which conducted longitudinal empirical multi-method work in eight conflict-affected countries, supports. In Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023), Mareike Schomerus sets out a vision for what international engagement in situations of violent conflict needs to look like. The book posits that what is required is a new mental model to underpins international engagement that moves away from stabilization, state building and economic growth policies towards emphasizing the invisible elements of what the author calls ‘the mental landscape’ and an empirically-grounded relational approach. This requires a deep questioning of not just the practices of international development, but the underpinning beliefs, imagery, metaphors and ideologies. 

The book is open access and can be found here. More background information on the book is here.

Mareike Schomerus, (PhD, LSE) is Vice President at Busara in Nairobi. She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance at ODI and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium. She is the author of The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (2021) and Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (2023) and co-editor of volumes on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands. More information on Mareike is here.