Welcome.
I am Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. From 2023 to 2025, I was Director of the MA Program in Peace and Conflict Studies (PECOS) at the University of Oslo. Since 2020, I direct the ERC Starting Grant project ‘ResilienceBuilding: Social Resilience, Gendered Dynamics, and Local Peace in Protracted Conflicts’.
My research focuses on international security, war and armed conflict, and social resilience and peacebuilding. I work especially on gender, peace and security; climate change and social resilience; communal violence and civil wars; and local and international peace processes. I have conducted extensive fieldwork on these topics in Indonesia and Nigeria, and more recently in Myanmar, Kenya, and South Sudan.
My first book, Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War (CUP 2018), won the 2019 Lee Ann Fuji Award from the American Political Science Association’s Interpretivist Methodologies and Methods Group, and was runner-up for the 2019 Conflict Research Society’s Book of the Year Award. I am also co-editor of the book Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings (OUP 2023).
My research on gender, peace and security focuses particularly on women’s participation in peace processes. My work on communal conflict and variation in sexual violence received the 2020 Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award from the Journal of Peace Research. I currently edit a special journal issue on Reclaiming Resilience: Women’s Peacebuilding Agency in Protracted Crises.
My work has appeared in African Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Global Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Interactions, Journal of Peace Research, and Political Geography, among other outlets. My research received funding from the European Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, among others.
I hold a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute (2013). Before coming to Oslo, I was an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. I have also held visiting positions at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (Nairobi), the Hertie School in Berlin, Yale University, and Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Originally from East Berlin, I have lived and taught in Geneva, London, and Amsterdam, and now live in Oslo with my husband and daughter.
Resilience Building
Social Resilience, Gendered Dynamics, and Local Peace in Protracted Conflicts
Can local peace processes build social resilience and contribute to sustainable peace? How does gendered civilian agency shape community structures and the potential to prevent violence? Do international resilience building interventions make local communities less vulnerable to the impact of the climate crisis and the risk of renewed conflict?
The research team addresses these questions with a focus on Nigeria, Kenya, and South Sudan. The team brings together researchers with complementary skills sets who implement multi-method approaches, combining in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observation with event data analysis, survey research, and archival work.
