Craig R. Janes

Creating Vulnerability: Environmental Change, Failed Development, and Livelihood Insecurity in Post-Socialist Mongolia

While at SAR, Dr. Janes will be working on a book examining the impact of Mongolia’s socioeconomic and political transition within the context of increasing environmental hazards linked to climate change. Dr. Janes’s book will be grounded in more than a decade of ethnographic research and will employ a narrative structure that moves from local to state levels and from rural to urban locales. The book will also be broadly historical in scope, moving across the 20th and early 21st centuries to describe and analyze patterns of socialist and then post-socialist change. The book is intended to contribute to the ethnography of contemporary Mongolian society as well as to the anthropological literature on pastoralism, post-socialist transitions, and development. Beyond anthropology, the book will engage and inform the current and rapidly growing multidisciplinary literature on climate change, hazard analysis, environmental risk, and vulnerability.