I am Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. My research focuses on gender, peace and security; climate change, gender and social resilience; communal violence and civil wars; and local and international peace processes.

Over the past fifteen years, I have conducted hundreds of interviews in conflict zones about how civilians protect themselves and build peace locally, including South Sudan, Kenya, Myanmar, as well as Indonesia and Nigeria. I am the author of Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War  (CUP 2018) and co-editor of Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings (OUP 2023). 

My research has won several awards, including the 2019 Lee Ann Fujii Award from the APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Section for my book Resilient Communities. I also received the 2020 Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award from the Journal of Peace Research for my article Restrained or Constrained? Election, Communal Conflicts, and Variation in Sexual Violence. My work has been funded by the European Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden, among others.

From 2023 to 2025, I had the privilege of being Program Director of the MA Peace and Conflict Studies (PECOS) at the UiO.  

Recently, I was Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for International Security at the Hertie School in Berlin. Before joining UiO, I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. In 2019/20, I was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Before that, I was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University, and at Gadjah Mana University Yogyakarta. I studied political science and international relations at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. I hold a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Originally from East Berlin, I have lived and taught in Geneva, London, and Amsterdam, and now live in Oslo with my husband and daughter, where we enjoy the great outdoors.