Doris Buddenberg read Slavonic studies, economics and ethnology at Heidelberg University, graduating with an MSc and a PhD 1980.
From 1980 to 1985 she was a visiting professor at Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan, working with post-graduate students in the Anthropology Department. Her research focussed on heterodox Islam in northern Pakistan. Work in drug control started with the first Pakistan National Survey on Drug Abuse in the early 1980s.
Following one year of teaching at Heidelberg University, she worked as a consultant from 1986 to 1995. Key assignments, for various regional and international organisations included institution and capacity building for governments, design and evaluation of drug control programmes, alternative livelihood strategies and the development of national drug control strategies. During this period, she worked in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Laos and Indonesia.
She joined UNODC in 1996 as an economist at the Headquarters in Vienna dealing with economic research on drug economies as well as backstopping UNODC’s global alternative development programme.
In 2000 she headed UNODC’s country programme in Viet Nam, which focussed on law enforcement, alternative development, trafficking in human beings and demand reduction.
In 2004 she transferred to Afghanistan to head the UNODC office managing UNODC’s largest country programme. The drug control programme consisted of demand reduction, support to law enforcement (including border control), government institution and capacity building at national and provincial level, national opium poppy cultivation surveys and economic research on Afghanistan’s drug industry. The justice reform programme supported the three permanent national justice institutions (Ministry of Justice, Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court).
In early 2007, she was officer-in-charge of the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin. In late 2007, she returned to UNODC Headquarters, Vienna, to manage the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT), that aims to mobilize state and non-state actors to eradicate human trafficking by reducing both the vulnerability of potential victims and the demand for exploitation in all its forms; ensuring adequate protection and support to those who do fall victim, and supporting the efficient prosecution of the criminals involved.
