Professor Jeremy J. Swift: Outstanding Contributor to the Study of Nomadic Pastoral Societies, Past and Present, and Recipient of the IUAES Commission on Nomadic Peoples Lifetime Achievement Award

Abstract

Jeremy Swift's main professional interests lie with nomadic pastoralists in and around the world's great deserts. Jeremy, an economist, has worked on pastoral research and development in East and West Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia including China and Mongolia. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the pastoral Twareg in Mali, and has worked with many pastoralists across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Central Asia. As researcher and policy adviser, Jeremy has worked to strengthen pastoral economies, livelihoods and education. He has explored how to ensure they are economically and ecologically sustainable, and how to reconcile pastoralism with wildlife and habitat conservation. Overall, he has shown a strong commitment to understanding and unveiling misconstructions about the drylands and their socio-economic implications. (See his 'Desertification Narratives, Winners & Losers' (1996), in M. Leach and R. Mearns (eds), The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment, The International African Institute with James Currey Ltd, Oxford; Pastoralism and Mobility in Drylands (2003), Global Drylands Imperative Challenge Paper, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification; and the Global Drylands Imperative United Nations Development Programme, Drylands Development Centre, Nairobi, Kenya.) Jeremy graduated from Oxford University with bachelor's and master's degrees in English Literature. He received his Ph.D. in 1973 from Sussex University in Development Economics. Before taking up his post as a fellow of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in 1978, he worked for several other organizations. He was at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature from 1962 to 1965. This was followed by a post at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome from 1965 to 1969. From 1973 to 1977 he was a fellow of the Institute for the Study of International Organization, University of Sussex. Jeremy retired from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in 2004. Jeremy's work spans a wide array of important topics that scholars and students of pastoralism have engaged. His papers on drought and famine are some of the most important and include: 'Sahelian Pastoralists: Underdevelopment, Desertification and Famine' (1977), Annual Review of Anthropology 6: 457-78; 'Why Are Rural People Vulnerable to Famine?' (1989), IDS Bulletin 20(2); and 'New Approaches to Famine' (1993), IDS Bulletin 24(4). Out of this research he developed for the Kenyan government a district drought contingency plan (1985), the first in Africa aimed at a pastoral area, including an early warning system and a system of rapid response. It eventually became the national drought contingency plan for the whole of arid and semi-arid Kenya. In 2009, a year of a terrible drought in Kenya, he designed a drought contingency fund, implemented directly by districts and the treasury, to ensure that Kenyan districts had the resources to implement the contingency plan rapidly when drought was declared. His work on development spans decades of commitment to pastoralism and the drylands. …