Andrea Nicolas new at the Kolleg

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg welcomes the social and legal anthropologist Dr Andrea Nicolas as a new fellow in June. Dr Nicolas will spend a whole year at the Kolleg, during which time she will conduct research on legislative and juridical procedures of the Oromo people of Ethiopia.

Andrea Nicolas wrote her doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin, and has worked among others at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research in Halle. Her research focuses on legal pluralism, mediation and conflict resolution, and issues of comparative research.

For her current project, she can draw on extensive field research in Ethiopia, where she lived among the groups of Oromo and Amhara. She will be spending the coming months working intensively on the political and legal organisation of the Oromo. While supporting their traditional law, the regional government also tries to integrate it into state structures and to harmonise it with the Western model of universal human rights. This offers an excellent opportunity to investigate processes of legal standardisation, while at the same time showing how cultural exchange gives rise to completely new legal practices.

Further information on the research project

We wish Dr Nicolas a good start in Münster and look forward to working with her.