Lotje de Vries

Dr. Lotje de Vries is an assistant professor at the Sociology of Development and Change Group of Wageningen University. Her research focuses on local dynamics of (in)security, transnational security governance in peripheries and at borders, and state-society relations in (post-)conflict settings. She works mostly in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Lotje de Vries is a member of the editorial board of Politique africaine and co-edited a book on the borderlands of South Sudan. Lotje has a background in development sociology and a PhD degree from Wageningen University (2012). Her Ph.D. research investigated the everyday performance of power in a post-conflict society and argued that the overall process of state-building in South Sudan cannot be adequately understood in separation from the ways in which state power is locally exercised. It analyzed South Sudan’s political transformation from the vantage point of the everyday practice of state agents in the border area with DR Congo and Uganda. Before joining Wageningen, she worked at the Centre for International Conflict – Analysis and Management (CICAM) of the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University and as a postdoctoral research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (Institute of African Affairs) (GIGA) in Hamburg, Germany. Prior to starting her PhD research at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, she worked in Senegal with the development organization Enda Diapol.

For more information on her work, research projects and publications, please visit https://www.lotjedevries.com.