(Tsegaye Moreda) T.M. Shegro

Tsegaye Moreda is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and a founding member of Young African Researchers in Agriculture (YARA) network based at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has taught both at undergraduate and graduate levels. The graduate courses that he has taught – together with many senior scholars at the ISS – include Political Economy and Political Ecology of Agriculture and Environment (ISS-4150) (with, among others, Prof. Jun Borras, Prof. Murat Arsel and Dr. Julien-Francois Gerber) and Politics of Agrarian Transformation (ISS-4335) (with Prof. Borras). He also teaches a graduate course on the politics of agrarian transformation and development in the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD) at China Agricultural University in Beijing. He has also previously taught a variety of undergraduate courses in Ethiopia on political geography, economic geography, development theory, development policy, and research methods.

His research interests are in the politics of natural resources: land, water, forests, sub-soil minerals – examined in the era of the global resource rush (land grabbing, the rise of extractivism, agro-extractivism, large-scale development interventions) and climate change (focusing on the politics of narratives around mitigation and adaptation) – with special emphasis on how poor people understand about their agency (autonomy and capacity) to understand their situation – and change it. He also has work and interest in the various forms of political reactions by poor people towards dynamic changes in the political economy (land/property, labour, income, reproduction) of natural resources, including in studying – and at the same time, working with – social movements. Transversal themes in his interest in and treatment of all these issues are conflict, power and political contestations across social class and identity politics, mediated by and through the state. It is in this context that he also looks into converging social movements partly in reaction to the parallel and overlapping processes of global resource rush and climate change mitigation narrative: agrarian movements, environmental movements, fishers movements, food sovereignty movements. He works and continues to hone his intellectual skills along the tradition of scholar-activism. His regional focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Previously, he was a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Gondar in Ethiopia. He also held a position of community service coordination in the Research and Community Service Office of the same university.

He holds a B.A. in Geography and Environmental Studies and M.A. in Development Studies from Addis Ababa University, and completed a Ph.D. in Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He also went to a summer school at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK.