This blog was written by Freddie Carver and is a product of the X-Border Local Research Network, a component of DFID’s Cross- Border Conflict—Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) programme, funded by UKaid from the UK government. The programme…
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This blog was written by RVI Fellow, Nisar Majid, RVI D-Hum Project researchers, Ahmed M. Musa and Sahra Ahmed Koshin, and Salman Hassan and Khalif Abdirahman. The blog was originally published on the LSE website. On 22 April…
This blog was written by RVI Fellow Nisar Majid and Ahmed M. Musa, post-doctoral researcher at the Diaspora Humanitarianism (D-Hum) project run by the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Nairobi, Rako Research and…
This article was written by Abdirahman Edle Ali, Abdirahman Mustaf Mohamed, Jethro Norman, Karuti Kanyinga and Peter Albrecht. The authors are part of the Diaspora Humanitarianism in Complex Crises (D-Hum) research programme, a consortium made up of the Danish…
This blog was written following a meeting of researchers and practitioners working on Somalia, on 1 April, hosted by the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) and facilitated by the Centre for Humanitarian Change (CHC). Thanks to Daniel Maxwell, Hannah Stogdon,…
This article was written by Abdirahman Edle Ali, Ahmed M. Musa, Mohamed Aden Hassan, Nauja Kleist and Mark Bradbury. The authors are part of the Diaspora Humanitarianism in Complex Crises (D-Hum) research programme, a consortium made up of the…
Wisdom was the theme of this year’s Hargeysa International Book Fair (HIBF), held annually in Somaliland. A long-running supporter of the HIBF, RVI staff including Mark Bradbury (Executive Director), Anna Rowett (South Sudan Programme Manager), Mimi Bior (South Sudan Programme Officer),…
For over two decades Ethiopia’s political federation has been organized around the principle of ‘democratic centralism’. This philosophy also lies at the heart of the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition, and its centralized decision-making culture. Until…
The Institute recently wrapped up its fifteenth year of annual field courses, which were held this year in May and June in Kenya. The one-week intensive courses covered an array of historical and contemporary issues in the Horn of Africa, Sudan and…
In June and July, the Rift Valley Institute will hold the 2019 annual field courses in Ethiopia. Now in their sixteenth year, each course examines a different sub-region within eastern and central Africa: Sudan and South Sudan, the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa. They…
Recent Publications
SHECONF 2026: International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
July 9, 2026
Event report On 26 March 2026, researchers, practitioners and academics gathered in Addis Ababa for SHECONF 2026, an International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in Ethiopia, the first of its kind convened by the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network (EWNET).
State Capture in Africa: How elite networks undermine democracy, development and security
June 24, 2026
Key points State capture has been increasingly recognized as a major governance challenge due to the way it helps to drive many of the most pressing problems facing contemporary states, including democratic erosion, corruption, economic exclusion, insecurity and declining trust
The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa
June 17, 2026
On 20 May, the British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA), Chatham House, and the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) convened a group of experts to discuss the ‘The New Geopolitics of Eastern Africa’. The closed-door roundtable considered the ongoing transformation of