Cory Rodgers is an anthropologist exploring the influence of humanitarian and development policies on communal identity and inter-group relations. His current research in Kenya and Lebanon looks at humanitarian strategies to promote social cohesion between refugees and local communities living in contexts of protracted displacement.

Since 2015, he has worked primarily in Turkana County in north-western Kenya, the site of the decades-old Kakuma refugee camp, where he has documented the politicisation of a ‘host community’ identity among Kenyans living in the vicinity of the camp. His doctoral project was an ethnography of the ways that urban development in Turkana have given rise to intra-ethnic schisms between the growing town-based populations and the rural majority of mobile pastoralists.