Staff profile

Liam Devereux joined Durham University in 2024, beginning a two-year position as a postdoctoral research associate within the project "Reimagining Research Governance for a Flourishing Research Culture". 

Prior to this, Liam earnt an undergraduate degree in politics and a master's in international politics: critical geopolitics from Newcastle University before completing his Ph.D. in Human Geography. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Optionality and Peace in Kyrgyzstan: Exploring, Critiquing, and Rethinking Understandings and Practices of Peace" attempts to add to the burgeoning literature on rethinking peace by employing the work of Karl Mannheim, Hans Morgenthau, and Hannah Arendt to develop the notion of optionality. This was employed as a critical device and reconstructive norm through eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, exploring the ways in which external and pre-determined knowledges concerning how to think about and practice 'peace' was imposed at the expense of existing situated knowledges and practices. The thesis aimed to develop a novel conceptual framework through the notion of optionality that could assist future approaches in moving towards situated knowledges and practices rather than subsuming them under imposed blueprints for peace. 

Liam's research interests concern peace and peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, political optionality, phenomenological peace, the work of Karl Mannheim and Hannah Arendt, the development of methodological pluralism, and the role of uncertainty in research.

His publications include:

2023: Devereux, Liam (ed.), Introducing the Symposium on Philipp Lottholz’s Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering, Central Asian Survey, Vol. 42, Iss. 04, (2023): p. 726-727.

2020: Behr, Hartmut and Devereux, Liam, ‘Phenomenological Peace’ in: Richmond O., Visoka G. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

2018: Behr, Hartmut and Devereux, Liam, ‘The Melodrama of Modernity in Karl Mannheim’s Political Theory’, in Kettler, David and Meja, Volker, The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim, (London: Anthem Press, 2018).