Introduction: From Subjecthood to Citizenship in the Horn of Africa

Nicola Camilleri is a historian of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially of Italy and Germany and their colonial history. Currently he is a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC project “The Dark Side of the Belle Époque: Armed Associations and Political Violence in Europe before the First World War” based at the University of Padova. He received his PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 2017. In the PhD thesis, he investigated political discourses and administrative practices of citizenship in the German and Italian colonial empires taking colonial Eritrea and German East Africa as case studies of the comparison. For his research in Eritrea, Germany, Italy, and Tanzania he received several grants and fellowships. As a Postdoctoral researcher, he was visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute, NYU, in New York City, and at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt.

Alexander Meckelburg is a historical anthropologist. He was editorial assistant for the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (2010–2014), and is a research fellow and lecturer at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies at the University of Hamburg. He defended his PhD thesis there in 2017. He carried out research on interethnic relations in Gambella (since 2005) and on the political integration and ethnohistory of the Mao and Komo minorities in western Ethiopia (since 2010). He was a visiting scholar at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya (2017–2018). In 2019 he was a Herzog-Ernst Fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation based at Gotha Research Centre of Erfurt University researching the historical cartography of western Ethiopia. He was affiliated with the ERC-funded project SLAFNET | Slavery In Africa: Dialogue between Europe and Africa. For his current research he is based at the Institute for Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University working on the transformations of labor and the history of slavery and the slave trade in Ethiopia.