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Somdeep Sen

Associate Professor in International Development Studies

Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University in Denmark

Somdeep Sen is an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University in Denmark. While trained as a political scientist, his research is interdisciplinary, operating at the intersection of the study of politics, race and racism, colonialism/imperialism, and decolonization. Much of his work has been ethnographically driven. Sen has conducted fieldwork in Palestine/Israel, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Mexico. But his writings also seeks to relate the ethnographic everyday with the global. Accordingly, his book Decolonizing Palestine theorizes the everyday nature of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel in view of a global history of settler colonialism. Equally, the book builds on ethnographic insights on the trajectory of the Palestinian liberation struggle to delve into a global deliberation on what it means to be (un)liberated that draws on insights from South Asia, Africa and Latin America. Herecently also published a co-edited volume Globalizing Collateral Language that explores the global proliferation of the political discourse that surrounded the US-led “War on Terror”. Alongside academic outlets, Sen’s writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, Open Democracy, Jacobin and The London Review of Books.

Baidoa, Somalia

Makeshift, temporary shelter made of plastic and clothing at a refugee center in Baidoa, Somalia.