Queen’s National Scholar and Associate Professor of African and World History, Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario)

September – October 2018

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Andreas Fahrmeir

Funded by Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt in cooperation with Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften

Awet T. Weldemichael is Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the History Department at Queen’s University and an Associate of the Indian Ocean World Center at McGill University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He is the author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation (Cambridge, 2013), among other scholarly and policy publications. He has previously held teaching and research positions at African, European and U.S. universities, and worked for international organizations. He researches contemporary history and political economy of Northeast Africa.

Research project title:
Eritrea from the birth of its liberation movement in 1961 to the present

Abstract
My project is a study of contemporary Eritrea from the birth of its liberation movement in 1961 to the present. It aims to examine and better understand the origins of its current political system and the source of its sociopolitical malaise. Consistent with the Cluster of Excellence „Normative Orders“, it interrogates the worldviews, ideologies, declared visions and oft-repeated rationalizations of the liberation movement-cum-government through an in-depth documentation of the experiences of its leaders and rank-and-file. (Awet T. Weldemichael)

Publications (selection):
Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

“The Law of the Sea and Il/Legal Fishing in Somalia,” The Nautilus IX (Spring 2018): 29-52.

African Liberation Theology: Intergenerational Conversations on Eritrea’s Futures co-authored with Ghirmai Negash (Red Sea Press, 2018).

“Formative Alliances of Northeast African Insurgents: the Eritrean Liberation Movement and the Ethiopian Armed Opposition between the 1970s and 1990s,” Northeast African Studies, Vol. 14, No.1 (2014), 83-122.