Guma Kunda Komey is a social researcher, public academic and consultant living in Khartoum, Sudan. His areas of research include land rights, use and ownership, natural resource governance and management, ethno-national politics, state-society relations, conflict resolution and local peacebuilding. He has carried out numerous collaborative and individual research projects and consultancies in the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan and other areas of Sudan and South Sudan.

Komey obtained a BA (Honours) in Geography from the University of Khartoum in 1987; an MA in International Development Economics from the Graduate School of International Relations at the International University of Japan in 1991 and a PhD in Economic Geography from the University of Khartoum, Sudan in 2005. From 2005-2008 Komey was a post-doctoral researcher in the project “Contested Autochthony: land and water rights and the relations of the sedentary (Nuba) and the nomadic (Baggara) people of the Nuba Mountains Region, Sudan” and the project “Market Institutions in Nomadic-Sedentary Relations in South Kordofan/ Nuba Mountains”. Both of these ethnographic research projects were financed by the German Research Foundation and situated within the LOST group. From 2011-2012 he was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and in 2013 a visiting professor in International Development Studies at the University of San Francisco. Komey is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Peace and Development (JPD) and a member of the core teaching faculty of the Rift Valley Institute for the Sudan and South Sudan courses since 2009.