BIOGRAPHY

I am a Swiss political scientist with a broad interest in comparative politics and development studies. I follow and contribute to academic and policy debates on the political sociology of the state, the causes and consequences of violent conflict and natural resource management in the global South. Since 1998 my research has concentrated on the Horn of Africa - particularly Ethiopia and the adjacent Somali territories - whose dynamism and political complexities continue to intrigue me.

My work regularly crosses disciplinary boundaries and I enjoy collaborating and publishing with researchers from other sub-fields and disciplines. Most of my studies are qualitative in nature and I have conducted some 15 months of field research in sub-Saharan Africa. In the future I would like to explore how comparative political science theories and methods can be made more useful for the analysis of non-Western politics.

I am currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, an associate researcher at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute. Previously, I was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a researcher with swisspeace as well as the NCCR North-South, Switzerland’s largest development studies program. I have obtained my PhD on pastoral conflict and resource management in Ethiopia’s Somali region from the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP) at the University of Lausanne.

Besides making sense of contested transnational politics, I am a board member of the Eugen and Elisabeth Schellenberg Stiftung and a former minister of the Democratic Republic of Tamtam.

CV TOBIAS HAGMANN (PDF)