Mamadou Bodian

Dr Mamadou Bodian is the Coordinator for Fulbright Fellows in West Africa at the West Africa Research Center (WARC) and a researcher at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar. He received his PhD from the University of Florida and is a founding member of the Sahel Research Group (SRG). Over the past decade, Dr Bodian has conducted extensive field research across the Sahel. In 2008, he served in Senegal as a Senior Researcher of the Islam Research Programme, a project funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and led by Leiden University in collaboration with the Netherlands Embassy in Senegal. Dr Bodian was also a researcher in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Sahel and West Africa Programme, where he served as a lead coordinator of the European Union-funded Central Mali Project for Security and Development, which consists of quarterly perception surveys involving 1,800 households in the regions of Segou and Mopti.

Dr Bodian was also a project coordinator for the Trans-Saharan Elections Programme (TSEP) at the University of Florida. The project covers elections and the democratic process in a set of six neighboring countries across the Sahel region of Africa. He was also coordinator of the comparative research project on Student Activism and Religious Movements in Sahelian Universities, a project that aims to study the trends and dynamics of denominational student movements on the campuses of public universities in six countries of the sub-region: Burkina, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. Dr Bodian has been acting as an expert for Freedom House (Mali) since 2015, Variety of Democracy (Mauritania) since 2015, and Afrobarometer (Senegal) since 2018. His research has focused on religion, democracy, and security issues in the Sahel region of Africa. He published the results of his research in various formats and has given numerous presentations in academic venues and to policy audiences. He is the coauthor of the book: 'Entre le Savoir et le Culte : Activisme et mouvements religieux dans les universités du Sahel' (Amalion, 2020).