Hilary Matfess
Hilary Matfess
Social media: Bluesky
Hilary Matfess is Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver, where she is Director of the International Security Degree. She is co-PI and lead Research Assistant Manager of the Women’s Activities in Armed Rebellion data project, which is funded in part by the United Nations’ Complex Risk Analytics Fund (CRAF’d).
Her research is at the intersection of security, gender, and governance, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has been published in International Security, Security Studies, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Civil Wars, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and African Studies Review.
She has experience with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and its associated army, the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF), in Ethiopia, and with Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Hilary is a Council on Foreign Relations Term Fellow, a Research Fellow at the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab and a Senior Associate (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Africa Program, and Fellow at the Centre on Armed Groups.
In 2021, she graduated from Yale University with a PhD in Political Science. In 2015, she graduated with an MA in International Relations, with a focus on African Studies from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Hilary is the author of four books:Women and the War on Boko Haram (Zed Books, 2017), In Love and at War: Marriage in Non-state Armed Groups (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Putting Women in their Place: Gender, Power, and World Politics (DeGruyter, 2025) and After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions (Stanford University Press, 2026).
-
Matfess, Hilary. After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions. Stanford University Press, 2026.
Matfess, Hilary, and Meredith Loken. "Women’s Wings in Rebel Organisations: Prevalence, Purposes and Variations." Civil Wars 27, no. 1 (2025): 15-41.
Loken, Meredith, and Hilary Matfess. "Introducing the women’s activities in armed rebellion (WAAR) project, 1946–2015." Journal of Peace Research 61, no. 3 (2024): 489-499.
Matfess, Hilary. "Alms, arms, and the aftermath: the legacies of rebel provision of humanitarian aid in Ethiopia." African Affairs 121, no. 483 (2022): 197-220.
Matfess, Hilary. In Love and at War: Marriage in Non-state Armed Groups. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
