Research

Political Anthropology | Conflict Studies |
Critical Phenomenology | Visual Research Methods

My research interests include

social work, authority, and audit cultures within (post-)colonial formations of development and security intervention in West Africa; civil society formations and NGOization; temporality and the coloniality of power
violence, intimacy, and conflict in the context of urban vigilante politics in Burkina Faso; ethics and affect; incarceration and the social life of drugs; crime and criminalisation; human rights discourse; anthropology of the state
urban activism, vigilance, and motherhood in Belleville (Paris); kinship and harm; police violence; narcopolitics; colonial legacies in/of Paris (preparatory phase)

Funded Research Projects

2026-2033
Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Principal Investigator

2021-2023
Politics in a Moral Twilight: Vigilantism on the Margins of Peacebuilding, Human Rights, and the Sahel Crises, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

2019/2020
What is (Un)Ethical in the Name of Security? Transnational Disjuncture and Moral Controversy on Self-Defence in Burkina Faso, Research Fellowship (6 months) funded by the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” at the University of Bayreuth.

2015-2018
History and Transnational Politics of Civil Society in West Africa and Europe, subproject (PhD) in the Collaborative Research Centre 1095 “Discourse of Weakness and Resource Regimes” at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

2014–2017
Negotiating Power in Transnational Spaces of NGO Cooperation in West Africa, PhD-project funded by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig University of Gießen.