GREAT MINDS
Krijn Peters is a rural development sociologist who has specialised in armed conflict and post-war reconstruction in non-Western countries. Educated at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, he learned to appreciate the importance of rigorous fieldwork. As an undergraduate, he spent 6 months in war-torn Sierra Leone to interview recently demobilised child soldiers and then went to Cambodia to study the reintegration process of Khmer Rouge fighters. Following his graduation, he worked for Save the Children evaluating their demobilisation and reintegration programmes for ex-child soldiers in Liberia. For his PhD he returned to Sierra Leone to study the infamous RUF rebel movement, resulting in the monograph ‘War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone’ (2012, Cambridge University Press). His current research – funded by ESRC/DFID – looks into the role of rural road construction and its impact on poverty alleviation in post-war rural Liberia. Many of the ex-combatants Krijn
interviewed have become part of West Africa’s booming motorbike taxi sector, but aid donors and governments remain reluctant – without hard data – to invest in what has become the most common means of rural (and urban) motorised transport. Krijn strongly believes that university education should be based as much as possible on real-life research. The above mentioned study and a number of other research projects on youth and technology, in which Krijn is involved, form the bedrock of a new and exciting MSc degree at Swansea University, in collaboration with the Prince’s Foundation, entitled ‘Sustainable Engineering for International Development’.
I strongly believe that university education should be based as much as possible on real-life research.
125
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online