Dr Gearoid Millar

Associate Professor in Sociology, The University of Aberdeen

Gearoid Millar, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and currently Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. Dr Millar’s research focuses on evaluating the local experiences of international interventions in developing and post-conflict states, and he has previously conducted research into the local experiences of two major intervention projects in rural Sierra Leone. His publications regarding the impacts of these projects have influenced various debates regarding international interventions, including their gendered and intergenerational impacts. These publications have appeared in many of the leading journals in the fields of peace and conflict studies, human rights, international development, and transitional justice including the Journal of Peace Research, Cooperation and Conflict, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Human Rights, International Peacekeeping, the Journal of Agrarian Change, Memory Studies, and Rural Sociology.

Through these projects Dr Millar has also developed, and has become one of the leading proponents of, an ethnographic approach to the evaluation of international interventions. In 2014 he published his first monograph, titled An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding: Understanding Local Experiences in Transitional States (Routledge), which outlined a four-pillar model for such research. In 2018 he published an edited volume titled Ethnographic Peace Research: Approaches and Tensions (Palgrave), which presents the work of various scholars who deploy a diversity of research methods to examine the impact and experience of interventions across a range of cases. Dr Millar’s most recent publications have addressed the complex and trans-scalar nature of international interventions, and the preparedness of international actors to face the complex challenges to peace in the 21st Century. His ongoing project, initially funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2018-19, examines how prepared the academic, policy, and practitioner communities involved in interventions are to face 21st Century challenges to peace