Abstract

Marcus Lenzen is Senior Conflict Adviser at the UK Department for International Development.

About Marcus:

Marcus Lenzen joined the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in 2009. He is currently the Senior Conflict Adviser in the Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department (CHASE) and leads a team driving DFID ’s policy on building peace and stability. Previous DFID roles included Acting Humanitarian Counselor at the UK Mission in Geneva, lead Conflict Adviser in Nigeria and policy lead on multilateral peacebuilding institutions. Marcus held prior positions on development, peacebuilding and transitional justice with UNDP and GIZ . He has worked in and on a range of countries including the Balkans, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste, Guatemala and Peru. In 2013/14, he was a Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and has served in a number of advisory roles, including as a member of Wilton Park’s Advisory Council and on research programmes at Oxford University and the International Center for Transitional Justice. He holds an MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MA in Politics, Modern History, and Applied Cultural Studies from the University of Muenster (Germany).

About the CGHR Practitioner Series:

For those hoping to pursue a career in the ‘Third Sector’, especially amidst a broad range of organisations and agencies whose mandates can be loosely collected under the umbrella headings of ‘Human Rights and Social Justice’, ‘Conflict and Security’ or ‘Development and Humanitarian Aid,’ the terrain can be difficult to navigate. A sound academic training, the kind provided by Cambridge University, is important but certainly not enough to prepare students for the transition into working in this sector. Through a mixture of substantive discussion, personal reflection and practical advice, the CGHR Practitioner Series brings together high‐level experts working in these fields and creates a forum in which students and researchers can listen and ask questions about what this work actually involves, seek out reflections from experience on the dilemmas and challenges faced, and probe the skill set and experience needed to forge a career in these fields.

More about the CGHR Practitioner series: http://www.cghr.polis.cam.ac.uk/events/practitioner_series