Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Conflict Studies, Marburg University within the research network on Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. Her areas of interest include African international relations, peace movements and post-conflict transformation, gender politics and postcolonial studies. She holds a doctoral degree in Political Science (2012) from Goethe University Frankfurt, where she taught and conducted research between 2013 - 2019. Her areas of specialisation include African international relations, peace movements and post-conflict transformation processes, gender politics and postcolonial studies. Previously, she was tenured Professor of Peace and Development Studies at the University of South Africa (2022-2024) and held visiting resp. substitute professorships at the University of Vienna (2016/2017), the Justus Liebig University Giessen (2020) and the University of Kassel (2019-2021).

Among her publications, she is the author and resp. co-editor of the books: 

• Mobilizing Transnational Gender Politics in Post-Genocide Rwanda (2015)
• Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations, and Transformations (2016)
• Afrasian Transformations: Transregional Perspectives on Development Cooperation, Social Mobility, and Cultural Change (2020)
• Gewalt, Krieg und Flucht: Feministische Perspektiven auf Sicherheit (2021)

She is also the co-editor of the Routledge Book Series Gender in a Global/Local World.