Supervisor: Professor Richard Reid
Research Topic: Contours of The Ogaden War
My Research:
Despite accounts describing the Ogaden war in terms of Cold War Rivalry and African decisive battles in a rare instance of African Interstate war, the Somali invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 was really part of a larger renaissance of regional dynamics and a resumption of wars rooted in patterns of violence dating before the 19th Century. These precolonial patterns of violence constructed politically unstable states defined by opportunistic militarism. The Somali invasion is therefore rooted in much earlier patterns of violence between Ethiopians and Somalis, requiring greater historical depth.
My Background:
I am a historian of Africa and war in the Global and Imperial History faculty focused on understanding the deeper historical roots of contemporary war and warfare in Africa. I am particularly interested in the culture and practice of warfare in the modern period and have focused on the transformations in violence in the late precolonial period (the nineteenth century), as well as on more recent armed insurgencies, especially those between the 1950s and the 1980s. My dissertation examines the Frontiers of Violence between Ethiopia and Somalia in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Somali Dervish movement under the leadership of the Sayid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, and the transition of peoples in the Ogaden from locally produced blade weapons to imported firearms technology.
