From February until April 2017, Jalale Getachew Birru joins the Leibniz sponsored Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) to work on her thesis about “Building Peace through Democratization: Institutional Building in Ethnically Divided Post-Conflict Sub-Saharan African Countries”. Jalale is a doctoral candidate at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt, under the DAAD Graduate School Scholarship Program (GSSP): Managing Fragility – Critical Perspectives on Good Governance. Her supervisor is our network member Solveig Richter. In the past, Jalale has worked as Human Rights Education and Communication Officer as well as Peace Project Officer at the Peace and Development Center (PDC) in Ethiopia, and as a public prosecutor and Attaché-legal advisor at the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia consecutively.

In her doctoral research, Jalale deals with electoral institution building in ethnically divided conflict-torn Sub-Saharan African countries. Her research fits the EDP Network’s focus neatly as it adds an interesting dimension through the analysis of conflict triggering elements of democratization processes and through pursuing the question of if and how conflict can be avoided by establishing institutions before the implementation of democratization processes. During her stay, Jalale also collaborates with Jonas Wolff on a contribution to the network’s special issue project on democracy promotion negotiation. The two currently work on their article entitled “The Negotiation of International Civil Society Support: The Case of Ethiopia’s 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation”, which will be discussed at the upcoming authors workshop in May 2017.