Department of Geography

I am a permanent research fellow and lecturer at GIUZ. With my MA in History from the University of Ghent, MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D in Political Science / Development Studies from the University of Ghent, my greatest research interest has involved the reconfiguration of public authority in environments where state sovereignty is fundamentally being questioned. This interest concerns, amongst others, situations of protracted armed conflict, as in the case of Central Africa where I worked for several years as a consultant, activist and academic. It also involves research on informal markets and non-state authority more widely. Over time I have been raising wider questions about the margins of state rule, both in a geographical sense (e.g. in border studies) and in a more anthropological sense, as in my more recent work on de facto sovereignty, for instance in the domain of transnational migration in Italy. In all these cases, I continue to combine a strong theoretical interest with a dedication to in-depth ethnographic study in domains that are often off the beaten tracks of conventional research.