Zachary Mondesire

Zachary Mondesire is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and religion in Africa as well as the institutional legacy of Pan-Africanism. His teaching addresses global ideas about social, economic, and political justice. Professor Mondesire is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on how transnational geopolitics become elements of everyday life. His regional interests span Africa and the Middle East where he has both lived and conducted extensive fieldwork – in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, and Tanzania.

His current research program includes a book manuscript that interrogates ideas about race, territory, and belonging as they have rendered synonymous two processes that seem effectively divergent – independence and partition – in the aftermath of South Sudan’s secession from Sudan in 2011. The ethnographic point of departure for the book is the insufficient liberation of political independence, the state violence and suppression that has followed the initial euphoria of secession, and the border-crossing networks South Sudanese intellectuals have produced to navigate their disappointment in the world’s newest country. This project joins a growing conversation about the importance of regionalism as a conceptual frame and socio-political phenomenon. 

Professor Mondesire’s areas of expertise include critical geopolitics, social movements in Africa and the Middle East, Black studies, Pan-Africanism, racial regimes, and comparative secessionist movements. His work has also appeared in the digital magazine, Africa’s a Country.