Post-Doctoral Researcher Job Description

Governing the Un-governable: Understanding the space-violence relationship through an interrogation of municipal and police functioning

Post-Doctoral Researcher Job Description

One year, full-time; Fixed term.

Located in Kathmandu, Nepal; travel as necessary for project

Reports to: Subindra Bogati, Chief Executive, Nepal Peacebuilding Initiative;

Salary

Up to EUR 2,300 per month, paid directly to the post doc by the funder.

Start date

January 2020

To Apply please submit a cover letter elaborating how you meet the job specifications, an up-to-date CV, and a relevant writing sample (this can be of any length, and should showcase your thematic and/or technical skills) by FRIDAY DECEMBER 6th 2019 to Jeevan Thapa: jeevan@nepalpeacebuilding.org

Synopsis of the project

With half of humanity living in urban centres, municipal authorities find themselves at the forefront of some of the largest development challenges we face today. Ensuring adequate security in fast-growing cities is one of these pressing challenges of our times. Though responses by cities range from mechanising their police forces to community-based interventions, there is a risk that urban security regimes are increasingly investing in the policing of cities, rather than in policing for cities. Where police forces are weak or corrupt, evidence abounds on people seeking security from private security companies, but also from gangs, or criminal groups. A relative blind spot exists around the nature of control municipalities are able to leverage over security providers in their day-to-day functioning. We ask how real this control is; what everyday bargains enable or disable urban security regimes. And, importantly, we ask how practices of governing security providers contribute to broader urban transformations over time. 

The Governing the Un-governable (GTU) project (funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Principal Investigator – Dr Jaideep Gupte) seeks to interrogate these questions with a view towards envisioning new urban horizons whilst also identifying workable policy alternatives through which municipal authorities can strengthen the provision of security in their cities. We will work closely with local civil society partners and municipal authorities in two cities in Nepal (Janakpur and Dhangadi) to trace the policy processes related to the provision of urban security in participatory and novel ways. We will use the findings that emerge to curate multi-stakeholder and multi-scaler dialogues within these cities, as well as at a city-to-city level, bringing in a range of stakeholder groups from Commonwealth cities with whom we share an ongoing working relationship. Our outputs and the dialogues will serve to strengthen best practices and support the iterative sharing of ideas to create legacies of change.

 

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