Dr Assala Khettache

Dr Assala Khettache is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the African Studies Centre and an Associate Member of St Antony’s College. Her research spans security and private force in Africa, regional security cooperation, and the role of moral injury in world politics.

Her current project advances understanding of Africa and the world by asking on what terms African governments and institutions are building new security partnerships, from the Alliance of Sahel States to the responses of ECOWAS and the African Union. She also teaches and supervises dissertations on the MSc in African Studies.

She is completing a monograph based on her doctoral research at Aberystwyth University, which develops the concept of Collective Moral Injury to explain how betrayal shapes trust in security partners, and how Wagner Group weaponizes it.

She was previously an Associate Lecturer at Aberystwyth University, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, a consultant to the Royal United Services Institute, and Executive Manager of a project on external actors in the Libyan crisis. She has given guest lectures at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Durham University and the University of Lagos, and chaired the British International Studies Association Postgraduate Network. She holds a BA from the University of Batna and an MA from the Social Sciences University of Ankara, and works in Arabic, French, English and Turkish.