Dr Benjamin Neimark

Profile

Benjamin Neimark is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, and a Fellow at the Institute of Social Science and Humanities (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. Benjamin is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of biological conservation and resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, ‘green’ precarious smallholder production, and agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. His current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries.

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Dr. Neimark has two recent publications:

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Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar (Uni. of Arizona Press)

This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, the local ‘eco-precariat'.

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Confronting Military Emissions: An Interactive Research Brief

Global militaries are some of the largest carbon polluters on the planet. Yet we still know little about their overall contribution to climate change. This collection of high-quality research seeks to fill the gap and open the ’black box’ on military emissions.

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Teaching

Postgraduate

• BUSM091 – Global Supply Chain Management

Ben is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).

Research

Research Interests:

Benjamin is passionate about exploring pathways for just socio-economic, political and ecological futures in the Global South. His work focuses on the uneven development of precarious labour in the green, blue and bio-economy. He is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of labour, biological conservation and resource extraction (bio-/green economy), high-value commodity chains, smallholder production, agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar.

Centre and Group Membership

• Member of Centre for Labour and Global Production

Publications

Amuzu, D., Neimark, B., & Kull, C. (2022). Bittersweet cocoa: Certification programmes in Ghana as battlegrounds for power, authority and legitimacy. Geoforum, 136, 54-67.

Neimark, B., Osterhoudt, S., Blum, L., & Healy, T. (2021). Mob justice and ‘The civilized commodity’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 48(4), 734-753.

Atkins, E., Follis, L., Neimark, B. D., & Thomas, V. (2021). Uneven development, crypto-regionalism, and the (un-) tethering of nature in Quebec. Geoforum, 122, 63-73.

Neimark, B., Mahanty, S., Dressler, W., & Hicks, C. (2020). Not just participation: the rise of the eco‐precariat in the green economy. Antipode, 52(2), 496-521.

Neimark, B. (2019). Address the roots of environmental crime. Science, 364(6436), 139-139.

Neimark, B., Osterhoudt, S., Alter, H., & Gradinar, A. (2019). A new sustainability model for measuring changes in power and access in global commodity chains: through a smallholder lens. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-11.

Neimark, B., Childs, J., Nightingale, A. J., Cavanagh, C. J., Sullivan, S., Benjaminsen, T. A., ... & Harcourt, W. (2019). Speaking power to “post-truth”: Critical political ecology and the new authoritarianism. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 613-623.

Public Engagement

Benjamin is a lead-initiator of global political ecology network POLLEN, and Editor-in-Chief at the African Geographical Review. He has a PhD from Rutgers University and a masters from Cornell University, USA.

Principle Investigator of the UKRI-ESRC funded Concrete Impacts Project.