Department of Geography

My research intersects a wide range of interdisciplinary areas. Over the last ten years, I have been working on issues of multinational federalism in Ethiopia, pastoralism and land grabbing, indigenous peoples' rights, development-induced displacement and dispossession, conflict and peace-building and human-envrionment interactions. Geographically, the Horn of Africa is my research focus. Above all, the issue of large-scale development projects in Ethiopia's pastoralist frontiers, and the subsequent land appropriation and displacement of indigenous socieites has attracted my research interest. Accordingly, development has become a violent instrument of state domination rather than addressing peoples' basic needs.

Currently, I am working on urban frontier expansion, and Ethiopia's Imperial Imagination and the making of urban subjects.