Reconstruction, Reconsidered: Belonging and Conflict-Related Property Disputes in Mogadishu, Somalia

Surer is a final-year PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge, where her doctoral research considers post-conflict urban reconstruction and conflict-related property disputes in Mogadishu, Somalia. Surer’s research engages debates around the politics of urban belonging in Africa, the aftermaths of political violence in cities, as well as offering a reading of Somali politics that moves beyond the stale categorizations of anarchy and tribalism. Surer is the recipient of the David and Elaine Potter Cambridge Trust Scholarship, and she is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow. Broadly defined, Surer’s research interests include space and urban post-conflict reconstruction, contested memory and discourses of belonging after war, and the politics of knowledge production in the Horn of Africa. Her research is supervised by Dr. Adam Branch.