Mitchell Institute Fellow Professor Eric Morier-Genoud has been awarded major funding from Round eight of the Open Research Area (ORA8), supported by UKRI in collaboration with colleagues in France (funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and Germany (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to work on a project entitled Governing Jihad in Africa: Ideology, Political Economy, and Violence (GOV-JIHAD). 

The ORA award, worth a total of £1.4million over three years from 2025-28, will fund three postdoctoral fellows in Belfast (UK) and Bordeaux (France) and a researcher in Bonn (Germany), as well as fieldwork, workshops and writing retreats for associate researchers and research partners in Europe and Africa.  

 Comparative in focus, the project aims at investigating how jihad governs and is governed in three different realms:  

• how ideology shapes what jihadi armed groups value and try to impose systemically (norms);  

• how ideology and pragmatism shape how they generate and use resources (spatial expansion and political economy);  

• and how ideology and tactical imperatives shape how they fight and against whom (violence and counter-violence).  

 The project’s approach takes both the local and global into account.  Researchers will conduct joint fieldwork to facilitate meaningful and empirically informed comparisons. 

 The project will collect high-quality data through immersive fieldwork and archival work, using meticulous process-tracing and systematic historical analysis to analyse how ideology shapes conflict in three main regions: Mali and the Sahel region, Nigeria, and Mozambique. 

 We look forward to sharing updates as the project progresses.

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