Laura Hammond is a reader at the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. She is a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) challenge leader for the Protracted Conflict, Refugee Crises and Forced Displacement portfolio. She is also head of the London International Development Centre's Migration Leadership Team, head of the EU Trust Fund for Africa's Research and Evidence Facility, and chair of the Independent Advisory Group on Country Information, which reviews Country of Origin Information products issued by the UK Home Office. Laura is an anthropologist specializing in food security, conflict, forced migration and diasporas. She has worked in the Horn of Africa since the early 1990s, and has done consultancy for a wide range of development and humanitarian organizations, including UNDP, USAID, Oxfam, Medécins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme. She is the author of This Place Will Become Home: Refugee Repatriation to Ethiopia (Cornell University Press: 2004), editor with Christopher Cramer and Johan Pottier of Researching Violence in Africa: Ethical and Methodological Challenges (Brill: 2011) and several book and journal articles.