Annette Weber

Annette Weber (born 1 November 1967) is a German political scientist specialised in Northeast Africa and gender studies. She has been serving as European Union Special Representative (EUSR) for the Horn of Africa since 1 July 2021. Weber previously worked as a journalist, a human rights defender and most recently as the regional expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (German: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik; SWP). She is also a novelist. During the 1990s, she worked as a freelance music journalist in Los Angeles and Prague. Weber wrote articles for German publications, such as the weekly Jungle World, the bi-monthly Spex magazine, the daily Die Tageszeitung, the monthly Visions magazine, and the bi-weekly Zitty magazine. She focused on the genres and subcultures of Hip Hop and Riot grrrl, an underground feminist punk movement .

In 1999, Weber joined the East Africa team of Amnesty International at its headquarters in London for about two years as a researcher. From 2003 until 2006, she worked in Berlin as the coordinator of the Ecumenical Network on Central Africa (German: Ökumenisches Netzwerk Zentralafrika – ÖNZ).

In 2007, Weber joined the Berlin-based Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), a semi-official think tank which advises the Bundestag (the German parliament) and the federal government on foreign and security policy issues. As a member of their Africa and Middle East research group, she focused on the Horn of Africa. Following a research stay in Ethiopia from 2010 until 2012, Weber chaired the regional SWP research group in 2013 and 2014.

Between 2012 and 2019, Weber was a senior advisor to the Berghof Foundation, a German non-governmental and nonprofit organisation working for sustainable peace through conflict transformation. Her project there, which was funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, supported the mediation efforts by the African Union between the government of Sudan and various rebel groups in the country. Literary critics praised both the depth of autobiographical elements and the freshness of the German language. thumb At the re:publica17 on a panel discussing "Social media and Conflict: How to mitigate online hate speech that fuels violence?"From 2019 until 2021, Weber was also a senior advisor at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which is headquartered in Geneva.

Selected works Why a Feminist Standpoint Epistemology Is Necessary in Times of Hegemonic Masculinity: Thoughts on Intersectionality and Transrationality, in: Josefina Echavarría Alvarez, Daniela Ingruber and Norbert Koppensteiner (ed.): Echoes to Many Peaces: Transrational Resonances; Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018; pp. 83–108 Profiteers of Migration? Authoritarian States in Africa and European Migration Management, with Anne Koch and Isabelle Werenfels (eds.), SWP Research Paper 2018/RP 04, 2018 Covid-19 in the Horn of Africa – Gaining Trust in a Crisis, SWP Comment 2020/C 20, 06.05.2020

A comprehensive list of publications (as of May 2021) by Weber can be downloaded as a PDF file from Weber's SWP webpage