Research

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. My work covers the field of Global Studies, with a focus on security, peace and conflict. My recent work also investigates the interrelations between climate change, security and development.

I am the Principal Investigator of the research program Pastoralist Climate Change Resilience in Somaliland (PACCS) (2022-2027). The project is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and involves partners in Somaliland and Kenya. Focusing on the livelihood system of pastoralism, the project investigates how to build on local climate resilience to address Climate-Security nexus impacts and the Sustainable Development Goals. It does so through collaborative research, centered on the co-production of knowledge.

I have a strong regional expertise on Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently I work within two main research areas:

• The first is located in the field of security governance, and examines regime complexity and inter-organizational collaboration/competition in the domains of peacekeeping, security assistance and the Protection of Civilians, as well as related processes of regional-international norm contestation. My current work also explores South-South security collaboration between Africa and Latin America in the aftermath of 9/11. 
• The second covers interactions between climate change and dynamics of (in)security as well as pathways for environmental peacebuilding and climate resilient development. I am particularly interested in how practices and knowledge on climate adaptation as well as climate security interact across local, national and global scales.

I have published extensively within these research areas, including in journals such as Environmental Science & Policy; International Affairs; Global Constitutionalism; Cooperation and Conflict; International Peacekeeping; Journal of Legal Pluralism; Peacebuilding; Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding; Conflict, Security & Development.

I am the co-editor of Reconfiguring Intervention: Complexity, Resilience and the ‘Local Turn’ in Counterinsurgent Warfare (2017, Palgrave Macmillan).

I have substantial experience with providing inputs – in the form of consultancies, reports, policy briefs, blog posts and talks/presentations – toward disseminating knowledge and informing policy-work, in Denmark and internationally. This includes, for example, research-policy engagements with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Danish Ministry of Defense, the Danish Refugee Council, the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German Federal Foreign Office, the United Nations Department for Peace Operations, the United Nations Development Programme, the Oxford Research Group, the Global Public Policy Institute, the Folke Bernadotte Academy and Safer World.

Previously I was a research associate in the Cluster of Excellence: Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS) at the University of Hamburg (2020-2021) and in the DFG research group Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order (hosted by the Berlin Social Science Centre) based at Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg (2017-2020). I have also worked at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) (2014-2017) as part of the Peace, Risk and Violence section. I obtained my PhD in 2015 at the University of Queensland, School of Political Science and International Studies.