Lovise Aalen

Lovise Aalen, research professor at CMI,  has researched African politics for  more than  two decades (including several long term fieldworks), and has developed an extensive knowledge of the social, economic and political conditions of the wider Horn of Africa region, with an emphasis on Ethiopia and Sudan. Her work focuses on authoritarian politics, politics after war, decentralisation and federalism,  youth's and women's political participation in autocratic settings, and diaspora politics. Her PhD dissertation explored the Ethiopian ethnic based federal system (published by Brill, 2011). For her post doc, (including a visiting fellowship at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford), she conducted research on the post war power sharing in Sudan and Ethiopia.  In 2015, she received the prestigious Young Research Talent grant from the Research Council of Norway (RCN). Since then, she has led several large research projects. From January 2024, she has been the scientific coordinator of the EU Horizon project 'ARM: Research for Information Freedom', focussing on information suppression as a tool for authoritarian states' foreign policy and towards diasporas in Europe.