Andrea Filipi

Biography

Andrea Filipi joined the Egmont Institute in May 2022 as an Associate Research Fellow in the Africa Programme. She is a PhD candidate in politics and international studies at the University of Cambridge, specializing in the politics of the Great Lakes region of Africa, especially Burundi. Her research interests include the politics of protest, armed and unarmed political mobilization, and questions of legitimacy of political movements. She is also interested in discourses and practices concerning relations between the Global North and South and the ways in which East Europe relates to, or is left out of, the dominant North/South dynamic, as this is the region of the world from which she hails. In her home country of the Czech Republic, Andrea sits on the board of the Czech Association for African Studies. Her doctoral thesis examines the political crisis that took place in Burundi in 2015, using civil resistance and protest politics as the entry point.

Andrea is also a civil servant with the United Nations, where she worked for ten years before taking up her doctoral research. At the UN, Andrea has held several positions at the Organization’s headquarters and as a political officer and special assistant in peace operations in Sudan’s Darfur region, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, Burundi, and most recently, Western Sahara.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University (a long long time ago) and a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (also a long time ago), as well as a Certificate in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford (less long ago but still in another lifetime).