Dr. Asmao Diallo

Asmao Diallo is an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth. She holds a PhD in Global Society Studies from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where she specialized in gender, land tenure, and agricultural cooperatives. Asmao also served as a Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Specialist at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) ITPO Tokyo. Her research draws on long-term socio-ethnographic fieldwork in peri-urban and rural Mali, examining how rural communities, particularly women farmers, navigate access to land, resources, and decision-making within contexts of legal pluralism, patriarchy, and socio-political inequality. Anchored in feminist theories of agency and empowerment and guided by Kabeer’s Resources–Agency–Achievements framework, she reconceptualizes empowerment as a relational and political process shaped by collective bargaining, institutional negotiation, and overlapping legal systems. Situated at the intersection of collective action, political ecology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS), her current research explores how farmers in Mali and the wider Sahel engage with their environment to adapt agricultural practices under climate change. She is particularly interested in indigenous knowledge systems, especially Zai pit farming, a traditional soil restoration technique that captures water and concentrates nutrients. Through an STS lens, she analyzes these practices as socio-technical systems shaping rural livelihoods, gender relations, cooperative dynamics, and broader questions of inequality and peacebuilding.