Yonas Ashine Demisse is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. He served as Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities (2018–2021) and as Head of the Department of Political Science and International Relations (2022–2025). He is also Associate Editor of the Ethiopian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (EJOSSAH). His research interests include political theory, comparative politics, and the international relations of Africa, with a particular focus on the Horn of Africa and Ethiopia.
Demisse earned his Ph.D. in 2018 from the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, Uganda, in interdisciplinary social studies, majoring in political studies. He is the author of Slaves of State and Intellectuals of Development: A Genealogy of Development in Ethiopia (MISR Reviews, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala, 2022). He has published numerous articles, including “Abolition and Manumission in the Beherawi and Betasabawi Realms in Early 20th-Century Ethiopia,” Esclavages & Post-esclavages [Online], 10 | 2024, and has a forthcoming article, “Reading Fiction as History: Slavery and the Slave Trade in Gǝrmaččäw Täklä Ḥawaryat’s Ali Habäši yäʾEdänu Ǧandäräba (Ali Habäši, the Eunuch of Aden),” in AETHIOPICA: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies.
As the 2025 Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, he will work on Ambivalent Black: Thought and Encounter in Ethiopia’s Africa Policy. This book project examines how Ethiopian intellectuals, literary thinkers, statesmen, and diplomats have conceptualized Africa and African identity, blackness, and internationalism within shifting global systems—from pre-colonial encounters to colonial and contemporary geopolitics. Drawing on Ethiopian intellectual and foreign policy archives, the project combines approaches from intellectual history and the international relations of Africa.
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