Professor Landon Hancock was recently awarded a prestigious International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars from the Council on Foreign Relations. Launched in 1967, this highly competitive award offers tenured academics practical policy-making experience through placements at a variety of US governmental agencies, Congress, or international organizations.
Dr. Hancock’s project is on the role of accountability in peacebuilding, including issues of legitimacy and local ownership. For the 2021-22 year, he will serve as a Local Peacebuilding Advisor to the United Nation’s Peacebuilding Support Office, where he will assist the Design, Monitoring and Evaluation Team of the Financing for the PBSO’s Financing for Peacebuilding branch. In this role, Dr. Hancock will participate in the drafting of in-depth guidance for the establishment and support of Community-Based Monitoring mechanisms for peacebuilding programs; support the PBSO and PBF to establish monitoring and evaluation plans in focus countries; and provide guidance and input as a part of the PBF’s ongoing Thematic Review of Local Peacebuilding.
Placement at the UN PBSO will allow Dr. Hancock to develop his research into the funding and accountability mechanisms of the UN Peacebuilding Fund, one of the international community’s largest and most influential donors, while at the same time sharing his expertise in local peacebuilding, legitimacy, and accountability mechanisms, built up during more than a decade examining local peacebuilding efforts throughout the world. We expect this placement to be valuable to the Peacebuilding Fund, and to stimulate Dr. Hancock’s ongoing research as well as for his teaching in the SPCS undergraduate program, the Conflict Analysis and Management Track in the Political Science MA/PhD program, and for our upcoming MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies.
Dr. Hancock is a Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies. He also serves as affiliated faculty at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University (where he served as Senior Fulbright Fellow for 2018-19). He teaches a wide range of classes at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and his research focuses on grassroots peacebuilding efforts and the role of ethnicity and identity in conflict generation, dynamics, and resolution.