Rob Ahearne

I am a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of East London. I teach courses on Global Political Economy, Global Governance, Global Power Politics, Global Environmental Politics and African Politics. My undergraduate degree is in Economics and Sociology (2005), while my postgraduate degree is in Development Studies (2006). For most of 2007 I lived and worked in Tanzania, helping to establish a small NGO. I returned to the University of Manchester and completed my PhD (International Development) in 2011, which involved long periods of fieldwork in Tanzania (2008 and 2009-10 respectively).

In my PhD I focused on what became known as 'life narratives of intervention', in other words, I conducted life history research with older people in southern Tanzania, focusing on conceptions of development and perceptions of progress, as part of a broader process of long-term ethnographic fieldwork. My current research builds on this somewhat, in that it investigates localized experiences of incipient processes of natural gas extraction in southern Tanzania. The apparent mismanagement of these processes feed into an existing sense of regional marginalization and maltreatment. This research utilizes concepts such as citizenship and resource justice in order to respond to the dynamics of community mobilization, especially in relation to the major protests of 2013.