Susanne Dahlgren: A long journey in Anthropology of Southern Yemen: From Society to Court Room to a Peace Plan

Susanne Dahlgren, a Finnish anthropologist specializing in southern Yemen. Currently, she is the director of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East (Beirut) since June 2023. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki and studied social anthropology in the University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics (LSE) and Helsinki University. Her PhD dissertation was published by Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY) in 2010 under the title Contesting Realities. The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen. That study focused on social dynamics in the city of Aden seen from the perspective of competing moral frameworks. The ethnographic study drew from discussions on moral propriety as present in Islamic and Western moral philosophy. Her second research project took her to study the history of shari’a and fiqh and the court practice in Aden from the British colonial period until the current era. Dahlgren is the past vice president of the Nordic Society for Middle East Studies (NSMES) and a current board member of the Association of the Middle East Anthropology (AMEA), an affiliate of MESA. She is the board member of the journal Hawwa and co-edits with Judith Tucker (Georgetown University) the book series Women and Gender: The Middle East and the Islamic World for Brill (Leiden).