Postdoc: Qualitative Researcher on The Logics of Destruction in Civil War

The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) is recruiting a time limited, fully funded postdoc on the research project ‘Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire:

Uncovering Scorched Earth Tactics Through Remote Sensing (FIRES)’, starting on March 1, 2027, or shortly thereafter.

About the position

The project establishes a new interdisciplinary research agenda, exploring the role of scorched earth tactics in situations of conflict, through a mixed-methods approach combining remote sensing and qualitative methods.

The task of the postdoc is to propose and conduct a well-defined, ethnographically grounded case study through which to examine the deliberate destruction of settlements, livelihoods and/or cropland in internal wars up close: not only where and when it occurs, but what it is embedded in, what it is meant to accomplish, and how it is understood both by those who carry it out and by those who live through it.

We are particularly interested in candidates who can situate such intentional burning within wider repertoires of raiding and predation in civil wars — the seizure of livestock, people and labor; the displacement of, and assertion of claims over, peripheral populations — and who can develop, conceptually, what such tactics reveal about how political authority is made, resisted and evaded in situations of conflict at the margins of states1 …