The Horn of Africa and the Near Abroad: Emerging interests and relations Friday 28 November 2014
Speakers’ Biographies
The Gulf and the Horn of Africa
Dr Roy Love is a former academic and economic consultant with a long-term interest in Ethiopia and Eritrea. He is currently working as an independent researcher on the economic roots of conflict in the Horn, and was until recently a Visiting Scholar and Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Dr Love was formerly coordinating editor of the Review of African Political Economy and an economics lecturer at the University of Addis Ababa. He is also the author of the Chatham House Africa Programme report Economic Drivers of Conflict and Cooperation in the Horn.
Dr Jamal Abdullah is a Researcher and Head of the Gulf Studies Unit at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Lecturer at the NATO Defense College in Rome. Dr Abdullah holds a PhD in International Relations Law from Avignon University and is the author of the book Qatar’s Foreign Policy 1995 – 2013: Leverages and Strategies.
Professor Afyare Elmi is Assistant Professor of international politics at the Qatar University’s International Affairs Department. He specializes in international security, conflict and peacebuilding, political Islam, African security and development. He is currently working on several research projects that relate to the Horn of Africa. Professor Elmi holds a PhD in political science from the University of Alberta and he is the author of the book Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Political Islam and Peacebuilding.
Jane Kinninmont is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. Her previous positions include Associate Director for the Middle East and Africa at the Economist Group, Middle East and North Africa Editor and Economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit (2006-10) and Managing Editor for Middle East and Africa at Business Monitor International (2003- 06). Her research interests include the international relations of the Middle East, deconstructing the politics of sectarianism in the Gulf and Levant, the development of opposition movements and new actors, and the challenges that political economy structures pose to transitions in the region.
Egypt and the Horn of Africa
Dr Laura James is an analyst specialising in the interface between economics, politics and conflict, especially over natural resources, in the Middle East and Africa. Now a UK-based consultant teaching at the University of Cambridge, she spent six years in Sudan, most recently as the economic adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel on Sudan (AUHIP), covering the Sudan - South Sudan negotiations, and as the economic adviser to the European Commission. Previously she was employed as senior economist with the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) in Sudan, and as a Middle East analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London. Her doctoral thesis, focusing on Egypt, completed at the University of Oxford, was published as a book by Palgrave Macmillan.
Jason Mosley is an Associate Fellow of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, Research Associate of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the Journal of Eastern Africa Studies. He was formerly Senior Africa Analyst at Oxford Analytica. His work focuses on the politics and economics of the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes region and Nigeria.
Dr Harry Verhoeven teaches African Politics at the University of Oxford and is the founder and convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network. He has collaborated with UNDP Sudan, the Africa Programme at Chatham House, Greenpeace India, and Small Arms Survey and has lectured at ministries of foreign affairs, defence academies and leading universities around the world. He is the author of the book Water, Civilization and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State-Building.
Professor Peter Woodward is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Reading. He taught at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Natal (Durban) and the American University of Cairo. He has written widely on north-east Africa, with his most recent book being Crisis in the Horn of Africa. He is a former editor of African Affairs, The Journal of the Royal African Society; and a former regular contributor to the BBC World Service. He has been consulted by a number of governments including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK and the US Department of State.