Mathijs Pelkmans

Mathijs Pelkmans is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A specialist of the Caucasus and Central Asia, his work explores specifically the intersection of power, knowledge, and difference. This is true of his first monograph Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia (2006) which traced the social biography of the Iron Curtain, as well as his second monograph Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan (2017) which explored the fate of religious and secular ideologies in contexts of intense uncertainty. His interest in the shadowy sides of knowledge is especially visible in the edited collections Ethnographies of Doubt (2013), ‘Wilful Blindness’ (2020, with J. Bovensiepen), and How People Compare (2022, with H. Walker), and is central in his ongoing work on suspicion and conspiracy theorising.