Gerald Bareebe’s research and teaching focus on the comparative politics of the Global South, with particular emphasis on civil wars, authoritarian regimes, and post-conflict governance. At SCAS, his project examines why and how civilians are targeted in civil wars through a systematic comparison of mass killings by insurgent groups and state forces in northern and eastern Uganda. The study investigates how political, social, and battlefield conditions converge to enable such violence, and how these dynamics shape the strategic and operational calculations through which armed actors justify, normalize, and implement mass killings.

Gerald Bareebe will be a SCAS Fellow during the autumn term of 2026.

Grace Diabah’s project, “Names as Sites of Identity Negotiation: Exploring the Changing Landscape of Akan Personal Naming”, examines how contemporary personal naming practices among educated Akans in Ghana serve as dynamic and complex sites for negotiating identity within a decolonial framework. While earlier practices privileged Western/foreign names (associated with prestige, sophistication, and cosmopolitan identity), the past two decades have witnessed a significant shift toward exclusive Akan names, often created in innovative and unconventional ways. This neonymic turn reflects a nuanced interplay of culture, religion, and modernity and remains underexplored in existing scholarship. Importantly, these emerging practices are both affirming and transformative: they reinforce ethnolinguistic identity while simultaneously challenging some established norms, including gendered naming conventions and the tradition of naming after family members. Alongside related practices such as renaming and the selective use or rejection of English names, the study reveals how naming functions as a key site for shaping and redefining identity in contemporary Ghana.

Grace Diabah will be at SCAS during the autumn term of 2026 as a Barbro Klein Fellow.

During his time at SCAS, Jamie Peck intends to continue his work on conjunctural analysis as a distinct approach to methodological practice and explanatory intervention. Principally associated with the cultural-studies tradition, after Gramsci, conjunctural analysis has been described as Stuart Hall’s “demanding gift” to the critical social sciences—revealed only in practice and still somewhat elusive. But it never came with guarantees, being about asking difficult questions, most often in challenging and contested situations. Jamie Peck will be working on two issues in particular: first, the development of a critical geography of economic ideas; and second, conjunctural approaches to comparison, space, and scale.

Jamie Peck will be at SCAS as a Fellow during the academic year 2026–27.