Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde

Primary research areas

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde’s primary areas of research are security, migration, and development in Africa. In particular, she focuses on conflict, terror, and peacebuilding as well as on international interventions (including the UN, the EU and Western intervening states) in West Africa’s Sahel-region.

Current research

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde’s research centres on how politics of security, migration, and development emerge as well as how they are negotiated and implemented. Her research builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Mali, Niger, and South Africa and her latest research project focuses on how EU’s externalization of border control is negotiated locally and nationally in West Africa.
Her thematic interests cover transnational security governance in the Sahel-region and in her research, she explores how local resource conflicts link to processes of state formation and jihadist insurgency. Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde is furthermore interested in the question of how different intervention practices influence the global distribution of inequality and security/insecurity along the lines of gender and race. How are they negotiated and contested at different levels of intervention? What are their intended and unintended effects? And how do local conflict dynamics transform and diffuse in the era of globalization?
Geographically, her research takes point of departure in Africa, particularly Mali, Niger, and South Africa. Moreover, she focuses on Western intervening states and organizations, including NGOs, the UN, and the EU.

Projects

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde is part of the collaborative research program: Borderwork - Migrants, Brokers and European Border Governance in West Africa, funded by FKK. Focusing on West Africa, this research project examines the human, social, and political consequences of Europe’s border externalization.
The project asserts that the expanded borders create social and political spaces that may cause suffering but also are worlds where new actors and new opportunities arise. Based on three ethnographic fieldworks in West Africa – Senegal, Mali and Niger – the project examines the ongoing struggle over mobility.

Additionally, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde is part of the research project, TRANSJIHAD, a five-year project which aims at advancing our understanding of the dynamics of transnational jihadism with a specific focus on Al-Qaeda and Islamic State – two movements that operate transnationally – as well as on Boko Haram and Taliban. The research project explores the questions of how jihadist conflicts become transnational and under which circumstances they can be contained. Through a comparative examination, the project has its geographical focus on jihadist conflicts across Asia, the Middle East, the Arab Peninsula, and Africa and seeks to combine micro- and macro level approaches to jihadism.