Harry Verhoeven:  

Harry Verhoeven is a former Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, focusing on the political economy of climate change, international relations and the linkages between water, energy and food security. His regional focus is on Africa, the Middle East and the Western Indian Ocean. He is the author of two monographs: Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan. The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building (Cambridge University Press) and Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict (with Philip Roessler, Oxford University Press/Hurst). Verhoeven holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA/MA (Licence) from Gent University. 

Biruk Terrefe: 

Biruk Terrefe was a doctoral student at ODID. He is now a Departmental Lecturer in African Politics. His research broadly focuses on how infrastructure projects and the control of urban spaces are integral to the politics of state-building in the Horn of Africa. His recent work has been on the Ethiopian state and the tensions between the ruling party’s centralised developmental ambitions and the ethnically federated architecture of the state. This tension becomes particularly evident in the study of infrastructure, as highly contested material spaces of political bargaining. He is also interested in the politics of urban spaces and the rapid urbanization witnessed across Africa. Biruk holds a DPhil and an MPhil from Oxford Department of International Development and a BA from Jacobs University Bremen. He can be reached at X/Twitter.