Lena Reim is a Departmental Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations and a Politics Tutor at St Peter’s College. Her research focuses on political violence and resistance, with a regional focus on Southern and East Africa. Drawing primarily on oral historical and ethnographic methods, she centres grassroots politics and locally conceived notions of justice to illuminate the political repertoires, narratives, and subjectivities of those who often enter academic and policy discourse as passive victims.
Her first book project concerns itself with Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi atrocities. It explores how this unresolved and repressed period of state violence continues to haunt Zimbabwean society as a second generation of witnesses and survivors inherits, reconstructs, and mobilises this violent past to challenge the political order of the present. More recently, her work has begun to explore bottom-up engagement with formal “transitional justice” processes as well as environmental justice activism in the context of climate change and a global energy transition.
Lena holds an MPhil and DPhil from the Oxford Department of International Development as well as a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Amsterdam and the Free University Amsterdam. In the past, she has worked as a Departmental Lecturer at the Oxford African Studies Centre.
