Daniel K. Thompson is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies investment, trade, and migration in conflict and post-conflict settings. His forthcoming book, Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands, explains why and how Somali businesspeople who had fled to the US and Europe as refugees suddenly began returning to Ethiopia and collaborating with autocrats in Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State after 2010. The book, and Thompson’s recent work more generally, explores how 21st-century border security regimes amid the global war on terror shape city life and transnational relationships. He has also published articles on this topic in Urban Geography (with Kader Mohamoud and Jemal Yusuf Mahamed) and Journal of Borderlands Studies. In addition, he has published extensively on the history of cross-border relationships and ethno-national identities in the northern Horn of Africa, on Somali clan identity (recently in African Affairs, with Namhla Matshanda), and on Somali and Ethiopian migration and refugee economies in South Africa. His research has been funded by agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Geographic Society. Thompson joined the Department of Anthropology and Heritage Studies in 2019 after completing his PhD in Anthropology at Emory University. He also holds an MA in Geography and Certificate in Geospatial Technology (University of Miami, 2012). At UC Merced, he teaches courses on topics ranging from globalization and economic anthropology to computer-based mapping of population dynamics and mobility.
