Caroline Hughes

Caroline Hughes is the Director of Doctoral Studies and the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. Chair in Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, an integral part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. Her work conceptualizes peace and development as political relationships constructed to legitimize unequal distributions of resources and subject to ongoing contestation by different social groups, which is contrary to liberal understandings of peace and development as public goods achieved through collaboration.

Hughes employs a political economy framework to understand contestation among social forces at local, national and international levels over political and economic settlements established in response to political crisis. She is particularly interested in how actors at different levels or ‘scales’ construct ideas not only of peace and development but also of ‘locality’ and ‘authenticity,’ the ‘international’ and ‘North’ and ‘South’ as a means to bolster their position in forging competitive political alliances and (de)legitimizing particular claims to authority.

Hughes has conducted field research in Cambodia; Timor-Leste, Indonesia; Thailand; and Vietnam. She has spent two decades studying the post-conflict reconstruction of Cambodia following its civil war in the 1990s. She also has published several studies of post-conflict statebuilding in Timor-Leste and post-authoritarian governance reform in Indonesia, and has completed several comparative projects that examine the ways in which a range of actors “on the ground” contest international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions. She is the author/co-author of six books, most recently International Intervention and Local Politics: Fragmented States and the Politics of Scale (with Shahar Hameiri and Fabio Scarpello, Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of one edited collection. She also is the author of more than 30 journal articles and book chapters, and her articles have appeared in Journal of Peace Research; Peacebuilding; International Studies Quarterly; the Review of International Studies; Development and Change; Democratization; the Journal of Contemporary Asia; and Third World Quarterly.

Hughes is currently working on two projects. The first project examines the changing relationship between narratives of peace and narratives of development within global governance institutions, examining continuities between the liberal peace era from 1991 to 2022 and the post-liberal peace era. The second project, pursued through the Whose (Outside of) Peace Studies? Lab at the Kroc Institute, explores the way that the field of Peace Studies in the academy has narrativized its intellectual mission and its responsibility to society at different levels, recently and historically, critically examining the disjuncture between what the field says it does, and the evidence for what it actually does.

Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Hughes was the head of the Division of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. She also is the former director of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Australia. She is an external advisor to the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh, and has consulted for the World Bank, the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and Australian Aid.