School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Profile:
Hussein Abdullahi Mahmoud is a development anthropologist who currently is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at United States International University-Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Mahmoud earned his PhD in the Development Anthropology Program from the University of Kentucky, USA and was granted a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany.

Dr. Mahmoud has more than 25 years of academic and research experience in the pastoral and agro-pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa, including Kenya’s northern, northeastern, and coastal rangelands, Puntland, Somaliland, Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State and southern rangelands. His research interests and publications are on pastoralism, pastoral livelihood systems, cross-border livestock trade, conflict, migration, and citizenship dynamics.

Currently, Dr. Mahmoud is a Co-Principal Investigator on two five-year long international collaborative research projects. The first is “Controversial Corridor: Exploring Changing Human-Environment and Security Dynamics along the LAPSSET Development Corridor in Kenya” based at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, funded by the Swedish funding agencies FORMAS and the Swedish Research Council. The second project is “PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins)” based at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.

Dr. Mahmoud teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in development, peace, and conflict studies at the USIU-Africa.