Biography

Professor Erin McCandless serves as the Qatar-South Africa Centre for Peace and Intercultural Understanding and is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. In 2024 she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Value at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, and she maintains a Senior Associateship at the Global Institute for Strategic Research at HBKU, while also serving as a Senior Advisor at the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria. With three decades of academic and practical experience across 25 countries, her research explores rising complexity in conflict and crisis contexts, emerging and non-Western actors in mediation and sustaining peace, principled movements for a just international order, and the humanitarian- development-peace (and climate) nexus. Her expertise includes leading multi-stakeholder applied research and policy dialogue, conducting trainings and facilitating strategy processes with national and international actors. As co-founder and long-time Chief Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, she has served to elevate Global South voices in academic and policy discourses and practice on issues.