Hanza Diman has been working as a research assistant with a teaching assignment at the Chair of Flight, Migration, and Social Mobility at the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich since 1 November 2023. His current post-doctoral project analyses the centrality of mobile voices on compact cassettes in Beninese-Ivorian migration dynamics (1970-2000). Hanza studied German language and literature at the University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin), and a Master's degree in Cultures and Societies of Africa (with a focus on African history) at the University of Bayreuth. He completed his PhD in 2021 at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the University of Bayreuth (chairs of History of Africa and Culture and Technology in Africa) and Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies on the history of firewood and charcoal (1907 to 2017) in Lomé, Togo. During his PhD, he also attended the distance learning course "Comprendre le Monde" in International Relations at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS, France).
He carried out empirical fieldworks in Togo, Berlin and Aix-en-Provence and is a reviewer for the Revue d'étude des migrations africaines. For his social commitment to education policy, among other things as a founding member of Model African Union e.V. and honorary coordinator of Afrika@school, he was honored by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier with the Federal Cross of Merit in 2022 and with the DAAD Prize in 2020.
Research Interests
- Intra-West African migration
- Migration history
- Migration infrastructures
- African Communication history
- Empirical social research
- Interdisciplinarity
- Political Developments in Africa
- Border Politics in West Africa
- African Energy History
- Oral History
- Military coups in West Africa
- Africa in Global Geopolitics