Lena Reim

Lena’s research interests lie at the intersection of political violence, state–society relations, and contentious politics in Southern Africa. More specifically, her research explores how repertoires of resistance emerge in response to violence, and how these dynamics shape political subjectivities, historical narratives, and political mobilisation.

Her forthcoming monograph, The Political Afterlife of State Violence: Gukurahundi and the Second Generation in Zimbabwe, will be published with Cambridge University Press. The book analyses how memories of Gukurahundi are inherited, reworked, and mobilised by a second generation of survivors to demand justice and contest present-day political orders. The book challenges dominant state-centred accounts of history-making and advances a political approach to understanding intergenerational victim narratives.

Her Leverhulme-funded project, Resisting Green Extractivism: Transforming Citizenship Struggles in Zimbabwe, turns to examining violence and political contestation in the context of the global green transition.

Lena has previously worked as a Departmental Lecturer at the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and as Politics and Organising Tutor at St Peter’s College. She holds an MPhil and DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Amsterdam and Free University Amsterdam. Her DPhil thesis received the ‘ASAUK Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in African Studies’.