I have BA in History from the University of Cambridge and an MA in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of 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.  My doctoral thesis was awarded the William Robson Memorial Prize.  After my PhD I took up a post-doctoral fellowship with the Danish Social Science Research Council and have been a research 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; NGOs; Rural Livelihoods; Religion; Christianity; Local Politics; Government; Africa; Uganda; Teso.

Research Groups: Politics, Governance and the State

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. 

My main work, so far, has been Beyond the State in Rural Uganda published as part of the International African Library series.  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 life.   Beyond the State won the 2009 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award by the Africanist section of the American Anthropological Association.   Reviews of Beyond the State include the following:
 

‘Jones has produced a very readable book and one that challenges current development discourses with good ethnography and historical scholarship. It is a book that will be particularly useful for teaching in undergraduate courses and in postgraduate seminars… And it is essential reading for students of Uganda, and indeed for students of Africa.’
Michael Whyte in the African Studies Review
 

‘A fascinating and convincing book’
Brett L. Shadle in the Journal of African History
 

‘Beyond the State is well researched and highly readable. Jones' prose is accessible and concise, making it an attractive option for classroom use. I can imagine that advanced undergraduate students in anthropology, history, and development studies would find much to value in this text. Graduate students and specialists will also appreciate Jones' ability to integrate sophisticated theoretical arguments into a compelling ethnohistorical analysis.’
Alicia Decker in the International Journal of African Historical Studies
 

‘I consider the book to be a welcome addition to the recent ethnographic literature on East Africa.’
Jan de Wolf in Social Anthropology
 

‘This is an accessible, intelligent, and stimulating account, and a very welcome addition to a literature on Uganda which frequently does limit itself, as Jones himself argues, to rather reactionary and conventional accounts of developmental ‘transformation’ which fail to challenge, as this book usefully does, the categories and assumptions on which many failed development interventions and written accounts of them are predicated.’
Tania Kaiser in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
 

Last year I was invited to talk about my work as part of Yale University’s Agrarian Studies Colloquium series.  Later this year I will at the African Studies Association (US) and at the 20^th anniversary conference of LSE’s Department for International Development.

I have written for The Guardian newspaper on their Katine development initiative, and am currently a contributor to their Global Development website.  I am also a guest lecturer with the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

I teach on the following undergraduate modules:

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

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

I teach on the following graduate modules:

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

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 taught at Copenhagen University, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London) 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: Aspirations and beliefs among the Banyole of Uganda

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)