Research

I am Assistant Professor in Global Political Economy at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at RUC since February 2022.

I am a political economy scholar, which I broadly define as studying the relation between power dynamics and economic structures and relations.

I am currently involved in two main research projects:

‘Politics of Green Investments: The Green Transition and Recognition of Colonial Relations in Greenland and Sápmi’, is a DFF funded research project running 2025-2028, where I am PI, and Ilse Renkens and Peter Leys are post-docs. This research focus on what we call a clash of moral imperatives between the pressure to extract minerals for the green transition and the need for reckoning with past and ongoing colonial injustices afflicting Indigenous Inuit and Sámi inhabitants of Greenland and Swedish Sápmi. This comparative case study seeks to understand how these clashing imperatives are negotiated between ruling elites and local populations in green extractive investments. It does so by identifying and comparing different forms of recognition (legal, socioeconomic, cultural) between ruling elites and local populations, asking how forms of recognition are activated or ignored in, and affect, the negotiation of imperatives in concrete investment cases. The project has recently been funded and work will commence late in 2025.

‘CASH-IN: Privately managed cash transfers in Africa’ is a DFC funded research project running 2019-2025, headed by Lars Buur (PI), and involving a team of 14 researchers from Roskilde University in Denmark, Makerere University in Uganda and University of Dodoma in Tanzania. The overall objective of CASH-IN is to investigate whether and to what extent cash transfers managed by non-state actors are politicized and how this affects state-society relations. The programme conducts a comparative analysis of humanitarian and development-oriented cash-transfer programmes in Uganda and Tanzania. I have contributed to developing analytical and methodological approaches in this programme, as well as field work and empirical case studies in Uganda. This project will be finalised during 2025.

Additionally, I am involved in Building Stronger Universities IV (BSU IV), a DFC funded capacity building collaboration between a Gulu University in Uganda and consortium of Danish universities including Alborg University (lead), University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University (RUC). The collaboration aims to strengthen Gulu University’s research and teaching institutions and practices. I am a member of the executive committee of the programme as representative for RUC, and co-leader on the thematic work package ‘Post-conflict Policies and Practices: Hosts and Refugees, Transitional Justice’. The project runs 2023-2028.

I have previously conducted research on the political economy of large-scale investments, social cash transfers and social safety nets, social responsibility of business actors, corruption and post-war reconstruction.

Empirically my research activities have for many years focused on East Africa, with a special focus on Uganda, but I have recently shifted to studying the political economy of ‘green’ investments in the Arctic, in particular in Greenland and northern Sweden.

I am leader for the Centre for Arctic Studies at RUC since Feb 2025.

I am teaching within the Master programme on Global and Development Studies, the International and the Danish Bachelor of Social Science programmes and I am involved in developing the new Master programme on Socioeconomics Sciences.

I joined RUC as an employee in 2022 but have been a guest researcher and post-doc at RUC since 2017. Before joining RUC I worked for many years at the School of Global Studies at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, from where I also have my PhD in Peace and Development Research.

In addition to a PhD in Peace and Development Research, I have an MA in Economics and a BA in Business Administration and Economics, based on studies at University of Gothenburg and Linköping University in Sweden and University of East Anglia in the UK.

I also have a previous career as an independent consultant within international development cooperation, primarily working with evaluations, sector studies and organisational assessment and development.