Fellow in Bergen
Senior Researcher, CMI
Political scientist whose research focuses on democratisation and human rights in the Horn of Africa.
Lovise Aalen, research director at CMI, is responsible for the research groups Humanitarianism, Aid and Borders (HAB) and Democracy and Governance. She has researched African politics for the last two decades (including several long term fieldworks), and has developed an extensive knowledge of the social, economic and political conditions of the wider Horn of Africa region in particular. Her work focuses on politics after war, decentralisation and federalism, the developmental state and women’s empowerment in autocratic settings. Her PhD dissertation explored the Ethiopian ethnic based federal system (published by Brill, 2011). For her post doc, (including a visiting fellowship at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford), she conducted research on the post war power sharing in Sudan and Ethiopia. She is currently leading a four year research project on ‘Women in the developmental state: female employment and empowerment in Ethiopia’ funded by the Research Council of Norway’s Young Research Talent programme, and is involved in the ‘Assisting Regional Universities in Sudan- programme (ARUS), funded by Norwegian MFA.