About

Florian Weigand works on authority beyond the state: how armed groups, smugglers and communities govern, tax and trade, and what this means for legitimacy, development and peace.

His research builds on long-term fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand, and feeds directly into practice. He leads dialogue with armed groups and de facto authorities, and has advised the United Nations, the World Bank and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, among others. Earlier, he worked for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and for the development agency GIZ.

Florian is co-founder and co-director of the Centre on Armed Groups ↗ and a Senior Researcher ↗ at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). He is also a Research Associate at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he received his PhD, and at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), Geneva Graduate Institute. He is also an editor of the blog Armed Groups and International Law ↗.

He is the author of Waiting for Dignity (Columbia University Press, 2022) and Conflict and Transnational Crime (Edward Elgar, 2020), and co-editor, with Max Gallien, of The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling (2022).