Erin McCandless is Professor of Politics and International Relations and Director of the Qatar-South Africa Centre for Peace and Intercultural Understanding (CPIU) at the University of Johannesburg, and a Senior Advisor at the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria. In 2024 she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Value at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, and she continues to serve as a non-resident fellow with Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS) and a senior associate fellow at the Global Institute for Strategic Research (GISR), HBKU, in Doha. With three decades of academic and practical experience across 25 countries, her research explores rising complexity in conflict and crisis contexts, emerging and non-Western actors in mediation and sustaining peace, principled movements for a just international order, and the humanitarian- development-peace (and climate) nexus. Her expertise includes leading multi-stakeholder applied research, policy dialogue,  training and capacity development, and facilitating strategy processes with national and international actors. As co-founder and long-time Chief Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, she has served to elevate Global South voices in academic and policy discourses and practice on issues.​​