Sierra Leonean scholar, Associate Professor Ibrahim Bangura of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, has been awarded the 2024/2025 Africa Oxford Visiting Fellowship Award.

The award is a 12-month fellowship that offers exceptional African scholars the opportunity to develop their research profile and build an international network in collaboration with Oxford-based scholars.

The Oxford Fellowship comes on the back of Prof. Bangura’s appointment as an Associate Professor by the University of Sierra Leone in 2022 in recognition of his enormous contribution to research. This highly accredited Sierra Leonean scholar is well known for his extensive publications with some of the most reputable publishers including Routledge and Zed Books. With a long list of over 50 articles published in highly respected journals, Prof Bangura currently provides mentoring support to young African scholars, through the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

The unassuming academic and policy expert has spent the last eighteen years advising governments, development partners and civil society across four continents and in over 40 countries. As a Resulted Oriented Monitoring (ROM) Expert, Prof. Bangura has assessed over 100 European Union (EU) funded projects and programmes on peacebuilding, human rights, governance, and democracy in over 30 countries in Africa.

His most recent missions include the assessment of the EU’s funding to the Federal Supreme Court of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission. In the field of security and justice, Prof. Bangura has distinguished himself offering technical advice and training services on Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants in a number of countries including Colombia, South Sudan, Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Somalia, and Liberia.

Prof. Bangura’s international development experience also covers extensive work with agencies of the United Nations, the African Union and the ECOWAS. Recently, he developed the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Guidelines for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and currently developing the Gender Framework for Peace Support Operations of ECOWAS, and a Strategic Plan for the National Counter-Terrorism Centre of Nigeria. Prior to this, he headed the team that supported the establishment of the Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism at the University of Maiduguri, in Borno State, Northeast Nigeria.

Prof. Bangura lectures in several prestigious centres of learning including the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Ghana, the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) in Sweden, the Barcelona International Peace Centre (BIPC) in Spain, and Transition International in the Netherlands.

The highly competitive Oxford Fellowship not only highlights Prof. Bangura’s commendable intellectual ability, but a recognition of the pool of talents from the University of Sierra Leone. He will use his year-long fellowship to explore the interesting subjects of “Women, Social Movements, Popular Arts and the Quest for Democracy in Africa” and will be hosted by the Oxford Department of International Development. His work will explore and highlight the burgeoning role of women in shaping social movements as the continent continues to confront the gyrations of democratic mobilisation against the forces of autocracy. This project will build on his previous work “Youth Led Social Movements and Peacebuilding in Africa”, published by Routledge in 2022.