Join us for this DPU 'State and Market' research cluster event, where a panel of speakers will delve into the motivation, actors, and trajectories of state-sponsored violence, shedding light on the underlying factors driving these conflicts. Our discussion will focus on three significant cases: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the civil war in the Ethiopian region of Tigray, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. Our speakers will provide information about their historical, political, and socio-economic contexts, allowing for insightful analysis and comparison.
Speakers
Estifanos Abebe is a development economist who has been actively engaging in civil rights campaigning since the mid-80s, covering Ethiopia, Eritrea and South Sudan. He is a former Director of the Ethiopian Diaspora Service in the UK, and also a long-time associate of PENHA. He is currently the director of TADAUK. ORG. An Advocacy Group, based in the UK.
Dr Sarah Vaughan has worked in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa since the late 1980s where she has conducted analysis on the politics and political economy of the region for a wide range of multilateral organisations, and government, non-government and academic institutions. She was a fellow of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh for twenty years, and has taught African politics and social theory in Ethiopia and Scotland. She is the co-author of The Culture of Power in Contemporary Ethiopian Political Life (Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2004, Sida, Stockholm) Changing Rural Ethiopia: Community Transformations (Pankhurst, Bevan, Dom, Tiumellisan & Vaughan, eds, 2018, Tsehai, Los Angeles), and Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War (Plaut & Vaughan, 2023, Hurst, London)
Simon Pirani is an honorary professor at the University of Durham and author of Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto, 2018). He has written widely on Russian and Ukrainian politics and history, including his book Change in Putin's Russia: power, money and people (Pluto, 2010).
Muhammad Shehada is communications chief at Euro-Med Monitor, a columnist at the Jewish Forward and a contributing writer at Newsweek, Haaretz and the New Arab.
Chair
Professor Michael Walls
Discussant
Dr Zeremariam Fre
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