Sudan

Sudan’s civil war, one of the world’s longest ongoing conflicts, has resulted in nearly 10 percent of the country’s population of 38 million being displaced—sometimes into the line of fire. An anthropologist and accomplished scholar, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, developing policy recommendations for addressing the crises experienced by war-displaced women. She is a visiting assistant professor of Africana and gender studies at Brown University and teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tufts University. Also a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University’s Divinity School, she focuses on security, human rights protection, and the cultural strategies adopted by displaced women to cope with the trauma of violence and relocation. She examines the opportunities and challenges of working with displaced people prior to post-conflict repatriation: Their experiences while displaced can determine whether they are a force for stabilization or destabilization upon returning to their homes. Dr. Abusharaf’s work has received support from the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, as well as the Andrew Mellon-MIT Center for International Studies. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research at Brown University. Dr. Abusharaf is the author of numerous publications, including Wanderings: Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America, one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States, and editor of the forthcoming Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Dr. Abusharaf’s peace-building activities include:

• working as a program officer at Sudan Development Corporation, overseeing major programs affecting women throughout the country; and
• conducting extensive research on the conditions of internally displaced people in Khartoum’s major camps and towns.

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