Mesfin Gebremichael

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Mesfin Gebremichael is a senior member of faculty at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS), Addis Ababa University. He is also a director of the African Research Universities Alliance Centre of Excellence in Post-conflict Societies, hosted by IPSS. He has conducted extensive research on the political practice and political economy analysis of Ethiopia. Gebremichael is a coauthor of the FutureDAMS working paper “Resettlement of Gumuz Communities around Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Dam,” funded by the University of Manchester and published in July 2020. His research interests focus on geopolitics, governance, and peace and development studies of the Horn of Africa.

During his fellowship at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Gebremichael is working to enhance understanding of the political transitions in Ethiopia and Sudan and how populism has contributed to the current political trajectories in the two countries and the wider region. Drawing on diverse sources, he is documenting varied political practices across the state-society interface, the shifting balance of power relationships, and institutions brokering elite-popular and state-society relations. He is examining how populist perspectives have influenced the war in Tigray and relationships between the countries in the Horn.

Gebremichael completed his PhD in peace studies at the University of Bradford, in the United Kingdom, in 2012. He is a principal investigator for a three-year hub-and-spokes model capacity development project among six African universities, funded by UK Research and Innovation.