African Studies Centre welcomes new Postdoctoral Research Fellow Assala Khettache

We are delighted to welcome Dr Assala Khettache as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in African Studies. Her work brings moral injury scholarship into critical security studies to rethink how security is felt, remembered and contested, and how these experiences shape political futures. Her research contributes to the Centre’s Africa and the World theme by tracing the security partnerships that African political actors are forging, and what these choices mean for Africa's evolving place in the contemporary global order.

Her doctoral research at Aberystwyth University examined why Wagner Group found a welcome in several African states. It developed an original framework of Collective Moral Injury, built on betrayal, vulnerability and affect, which shifts attention from how Wagner Group operates to how it is received, arguing that moral positioning matters as much as military force. The research drew on fieldwork in Algeria and Nigeria and on interviews with participants from Mali, Libya, Sudan and the Central African Republic. She is now preparing a monograph based on the thesis, When the Mercenary Plays the Liberator: Wagner Group and the Weaponisation of Collective Moral Injury in Africa.

At Oxford, working with Professor Rita Abrahamsen, she will develop her current project, Whose Security, Whose Order? The project turns from a single external actor to the choices African political actors are making about their security partners, exploring how governments, armed forces and publics choose, welcome and bargain with them. It asks whose security these arrangements serve and what kind of order they are building, across Africa and between Africa and the world.

Dr Khettache will also be teaching on the MSc in African Studies and is a College Advisor at St Antony's College.