Email: b.w.jones@uea.ac.uk

Ben Jones is a senior lecturer with the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia. Ben’s main research interests are centred on issues of social political and religious change in the context of the Teso region of eastern Uganda. From his work in Teso Ben has published the award-winning Beyond the State in Rural Uganda. In Beyond the State Ben’s ethnographic work in a village in Teso questions the significance of government in processes of rural development in Uganda. He also points to the importance of religious institutions and organizations based on family and kinship obligations as sites where people innovate in their social, political and economic lives.

Currently Ben is looking at the after effects of a major development project in Katine sub-county in Soroti District, Uganda. He is also working on a series of articles looking at new strands of development organised through Pentecostal or evangelical networks.

Selected publications:

Jones, Ben. 2013. The Making of Meaning: Churches, Development Projects and Violence in Eastern Uganda. Journal of Religion in Africa 43 (74-95).

Jones, Ben. 2009. Beyond the State in rural Uganda, International African Library for the International African Institute, Edinburgh University Press and Fountain Publishers, Kampala.