I have BA in History from the University of Cambridge and an MA in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.  My PhD was in Development Studies at the London School of Economics where I worked with Prof. Christian Lund and Dr. E.A. Brett.  I have also been a post-doctoral fellow with the Centre for International Development Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark. 
 

CV and Research Experience

Click here to download Ben’s CV

 

Social Development, Civil Society; Development; NGOs; Rural Livelihoods; Religion; Christianity; Local Government; Africa; Uganda; Teso; Nigeria.

Research

Broadly speaking my work looks at institutions and their significance in processes of development and change.  I am particularly interested in civil society organizations such as churches, non-governmental organizations, and institutions organized around family or social obligations and their relationship to government.  My regional expertise is on sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on eastern Uganda. 

The International African Library published my book Beyond the State in Rural Uganda in 2009.  In it I question the significance of the state in processes of rural development.  I also point to the importance of religious institutions and organizations based on family or kinship obligations in shaping social, political and economic opportunities.   Beyond the State won the 2009 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award by the Africanist section of the American Anthropological Association.  Later this year I will talk about my work as part of Yale University’s Agrarian Studies Colloquium series.

Current work continues research on political development and social differentiation both in eastern Uganda, and in the Igbo-speaking part of south-eastern Nigeria.  My work is part-funded by the Danish Social Science Research Council. 

I write for The Guardian newspaper on their Katine development initiative.  I am also a research associate at the Centre for Civil Society at LSE, and guest lecturer with the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
 

Publications

Jones, Ben. (published later in 2010). ‘Making sense of colonialism and civil war: religion and violence in Africa’, in Andrew Murphy (ed) Blackwell Companion in Religion and Violence. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. 

Jones, Ben. (published later in 2010). Contrasting trajectories: development NGOs and Pentecostal churches in eastern Uganda’, in Dena Freeman (ed) Salvation, Transformation and Modernity in Africa. 

Jones, Ben. 2008. Beyond the State in Rural Uganda, International African Library for the International African Institute, Edinburgh University Press and Fountain Publishers, Kampala.  Link to Publisher 

Jones, Ben. 2007. ‘The Teso insurgency remembered: churches, burials and propriety,’  Africa 77(4): 500-516. Link to Journal Article 

Jones, Ben. 2006. ‘Uganda', entry in the Encylopedia of Politics and Religion, Washington D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 897-900. Link to Publisher 

Jones, Ben. 2005. ‘The church in the village, the village in the church: Pentecostalism in Teso, Uganda,' Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 45(2): 497-517.  Link to Journal Article 

Jones, Ben and Karen Lauterbach. 2005. ‘Bringing religion back in: religious institutions and politics in Africa', Journal of Religion in Africa 35(2): 239-243.  Link to Journal Article 

I teach the following undergraduate modules:

• Introduction to social anthropology for international development (year 1)
• Sub-Saharan African development  (years 2 and 3)
• Public policy and welfare (year 3)

I am also convenor our “Development Work Experience” module which is the undergraduate module which places students with development organisations.

I teach the following graduate modules:

• Social analysis for international development
• Gender, difference and social policy
• Research skills for social analysis

I am also co-director, with Dr. Catherine Locke, of the MA programmes in International Social Development and Gender Analysis of International Development.

I have also taught at Copenhagen University, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the London School of Economics and have served as Guest Faculty on Brown University’s International Advanced Research Institute in “development and inequality in the global south”.
 

Research Student Supervision

I currently supervise the following research students at UEA:

Hannah Atkins: The value of beliefs: a Ugandan case study
Juliet Colman: Consumption as a means of reconfiguring gender relations: a Botswana case study
Samuel Rushworth: Learning to live together: education, identity and citizenship in Rwandan schools
Daniel Wroe: Narratives of democracy in Malawi

and the following external students:

Edwardneil A. Benavidez: Churches and Christian development organisations in the Philippines (Oxford Centre for Mission Studies)