Mareike Schomerus

Mareike Schomerus, (PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science) is Vice President at the Busara Center in Nairobi. She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance at ODI in London, and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, also at ODI. At Busara, she heads the Center’s work that links behavioral science, fragility and violent conflict (including the Atelier on Collaborative Transformation in Fragile Settings), as well as trust in authority and information for societal pandemic preparedness through the BESSI Collaboration. She is a widely published researcher with a body of work on violent conflict, political contestation and peace processes in South Sudan and Uganda and across borders, as well as behavioral mechanisms in post-conflict recovery, for which she has developed a body of work on the ’mental landscape’ of lives in or after situations of violence conflict. In addition to conducting and leading academic research, she has conducted applied research for a wide range of international organisations. She is the co-editor of two volumes (on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan) and author of the monographs The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa, Cambridge University Press 2021. A full list of publications can be found here.