Sara De Simone

Sara de Simone holds a Ph.D in African Studies from the University of Naples L'Orientale, in a joint programme with the Doctoral School of Political Sciences of the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her thesis, on the intersections between state-building and state formation in post-conflict South Sudan, was published as a monography in 2022 by Brill. Between 2020 and 2023 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of International Studies of the University of Trento, in the framework of the National Research Project (PRIN) "Inventing the Global Environment. Science, Politics, Advocacy and the Environment-Development Nexus in the Cold War and Beyond", funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Her research focused on dam-bulding in Ethiopia between the 1960s and the 2000s, and on the interactions between international scientists and experts and Ethiopian governments around the environment-development nexus. In 2017 she obtained a a research scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation for the project "Human security among South Sudanese self-settled refugees in Uganda: strategies of access to basic services", and between 2017 and 2019 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. She was a visiting scholar at the College of Social Sciences of the University of Juba, at the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) and at the Institute of Peace and Security Studies of the Addis Ababa University. She holds a Master Degree in Development Studies and also worked as a consultant for several NGOs and development agencies.