Tobias Hagmann

Tobias Hagmann is Senior Program Officer in the Dealing with the Past Programme at swisspeace. He is a multilingual analyst, consultant, and academic with 25 years of experience in designing, leading and implementing conflict, policy and social analysis. His work makes sense of how people and states deal with political violence and contested politics – and what can be done to support this process.

Tobias is an experienced team leader, trainer, grant writer, and editor and has consulted for various organisations, including FCDO, Swiss FDFA, SDC, and the World Bank. He regularly curates political analysis and debates in collaboration with practitioners and experts from different disciplines and parts of the world. Most of his work has concentrated on the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, and Somalia. His academic publications centre on political violence, state failure and formation, and land governance in the global South. He has written for the New York Times, International Crisis Group, Ethiopia Insight, openDemocracy, and other media outlets.

Before joining swisspeace, Tobias was managing director of Public Culture Lab Ltd, a private consultancy, and an associate professor in international development at Roskilde University in Denmark. He was a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Furthermore, Tobias is a longstanding fellow at the Rift Valley Institute in London/Nairobi and supports Somali Public Agenda in Mogadishu. He has taught and supervised students at the universities of Basel, Nairobi, Roskilde, and Zurich.

Tobias holds a PhD in public administration from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and was trained in research management at the Copenhagen Business School.