Professor Mark Duffield

Personal profile

Mark Duffield is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre.  He has taught at the Universities of Khartoum, Aston and Birmingham and held Fellowships and Chairs at Sussex, Leeds and Lancaster. Duffield is currently a member of the Scientific Board of the Flemish Peace Institute, Brussels and a Fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, London and Nairobi.  Outside of academia, during the 1980s, he was Oxfam’s Country Representative in Sudan.  Duffield has advised government departments including DFID, EU (ECHO), the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA); also NGOs such as CAFOD, International Alert, Comic Relief and Oxfam; and UNICEF, UNOCHA, UNDP and UNHCR.  His books include Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (2001) and Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of People (2007).

Research

My interests fall within the broad area of the politics of emergency.  This includes:

• Liberal interventionsim, humanitarian emergencies and social fragmentation

• The interconnection between development, security and the environment

• Disasters and the emergence of remote sensing and management technologies 

• Critical theories of resilience and the new biopolitics of abandoment

• Risk management, challenging environments and the aid industry

• Sudan and South Sudan as laboratories of liberal interventionism from colonialism to the present

Teaching

I have taught on development and security; the NGO movement; the changing nature of humanitarian intervention; the political economy of internal war; human security and the responsibility to protect; migration and development; and reconstructing war-affected societies. My teaching has brought critical theory to bear on current policy debates and departures. 

Recent Publications and Transcripts

'The Human Trace: The rise of cyber-humanitarianism' Presentation at Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), 16 May 2013: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/global-insecurities/news/2013/266.html

'How Did we Become Unprepared? Emergency and resilience in an uncertain world, 2013, British Academy Review, (21), 55-58: http://www.britac.ac.uk/review/21/index.cfm

'Challenging Environments: Danger, Resilience and the Aid Industry', 2012, Security Dialogue, 43 (5), 475-92.

'Risk Management and the Bunkering of the Aid Industry', 2012, Development Dialogue - The End of the Development-Security Nexus? The Rise of Global Disaster Management, 58, 21-36.

 With Brad Evans, 'Bospheric Security: The Development-Security-Environment- Nexus (DESNEX), Containment and Retrenching Fortress Europe', 2011, in Peter Burgess and Serge Gutwirth (eds.), A Threat Against Europe? Security, Migration and Integration (Brussels: VUB Press), 93-110.

Full publications list in the University of Bristol publications system