Nikolas G. Emmanuel

Kort præsentation

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Centre for Resolution of International Conflict (CRIC) at the University of Copenhagen.  I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. I also have a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego and an MPhil (DEA) in Political Science and African Studies from Sciences Po-Bordeaux and the Centre d'Études d'Afrique Noire in Bordeaux.  My work explores different ways in which external actors incentivize conflict management processes in Africa, along with the establishment of an African security infrastructure in response to transnational extremist organizations and criminal networks active on the continent.

How can a variety of incentive strategies (foreign policy options including legitimation, aid, diplomacy, sanctions, military intervention, etc.) be used by external players (states, international and regional organizations, NGOs, and individuals) to facilitate conflict management and policy change? While at CRIC, my research has focused on examining how these types of external incentives are being used to manage conflict and to facilitate peace processes by encouraging bargaining. For a recent CRIC edited book, I have written a chapter on how the United States deployed a variety of incentives to get the primary actors in the Sudanese North-South civil war (1983-2005) to reach a negotiated settlement.

However, I am also interested in examining how external incentives can be used to motivate various actors to cooperate on a (sub)regional basis to counter transnational extremist organizations (TEOs). My current book project analyzes how external actors (including states as well as regional and international organizations) use incentives to encourage the construction of regional security complexes to fight transnational terrorist organizations across Africa - namely Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (G5-Sahel), Al Shabaab (AMISOM), and Boko Haram (Lake Chad Basin Commission / Multinational Joint Task Force). I recently shared some my preliminary research in an edited volume with Routledge to be published later in 2017.  My contribution examines the ways in which France and the United States have worked with states in the Lake Chad Basin (Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria) in an effort to defeat Boko Haram. 

Furthermore, I am Co-Principal Investigator in a European Research Council Consolidator grant. The research team is headed by Henrik Vigh (Anthropology - University of Copenhagen) and includes a small team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Stanford and Princeton. In this project, entitled “Criminal Entanglements: A new ethnographic approach to transnational organized crime”, we examine transnational organized criminal flows between Africa and Europe. This project was given 2€ million over five years.