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Helen Lackner Associate
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Associate
Helen Lackner is a social anthropologist and analyst with 50 years’ experience of social and political movements in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen in particular. She spent four decades working in rural development as a social issues expert in more than 30 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe, where she has been involved in participatory strategies and efforts to ensure that poorer people benefit from international investments.
Helen's experience includes agriculture, livestock, forestry and fisheries projects and her focus has been on smallholders and tenants/sharecroppers, those facing the greatest difficulties in the current environment dominated by neoliberalism. She has a particular interest in water management, access to land and other resources, and the worsening conditions faced by those most affected [and least responsible for] global warming.
Helen was an early fellow at the TNI in 1974-6. She was the Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University in 2016, an associate researcher at London University’s SOAS from 2016 to 2022 and is currently a visiting fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations. She edited the Journal of the British-Yemeni Society for eight years and contributes regularly to Jacobin, Open Democracy, Arab Digest, and Orient XXI. She is currently working on a critical analysis of Saudi Arabia’s development in the past century
Main books:
- Yemen in Crisis, Devastating Conflict, Fragile Hope (Saqi 2023)
- Yemen, Poverty and Conflict (Routledge 2023)
- PDR Yemen: Outpost of Socialism in Arabia (Ithaca 1985)
- A House built on Sand, a Political Economy of Saudi Arabia (Ithaca Press 1978).