Isaac Olawale Albert is a Professor of African History, Peace and Conflict Studies and the pioneer Dean, Faculty of Multidisciplinary Studies, University of Ibadan. He is a member of the Standing Committee of Nigeria’s Tertiary Education Funds (TETFUND) on Research and Development (R&D). Albert was a two time (1991 and 1994) winner of the (MA and PhD) Thesis Writing Fellowship of the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar.
He established the MA and Ph.D degree programme of the University of Ibadan in Peace and Conflict Studies in 2000; the MA and Ph.D course of the University of Ilorin (Nigeria) in Peace and Strategic Studies in 2009 and was the UNDP Consultant for the design of the MA Peace and Development Studies Programme of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. He was a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Inequality and Human Security (CRISE) at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom from 2003 to 2007 and a Resident Scholar of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre in 2016.
He was the convener of the 2008 Extended Workshop on Social History jointly sponsored by SEPHIS (Netherlands) and CODESRIA on “Historicizing Migration”, St. Louis, Senegal, 3-21 March 2008. This project involved scholars from different parts of Africa, Asia, Caribbean and Latin America. He was appointed the Editor in Chief of the African Union’s African Journal on Terrorism in 2019 and the Editor in Chief of the ICMC Alternative Dispute Resolution Journal in 2020.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Mediators and Conciliators and an Associate Member of the Finnish Folklore fellows (Helsinki) instituted by the Finnish Academy of Letters. He was a Regional Board Chairman of the West African Network for Peace building (WANEP) Accra, Ghana from February 2015 to February 2017. He became a Member, West Africa Body of Peacebuilding Fellows in 2019. He is a Full Member of the Chatham House London (113597).
He was a federal delegate to the 2014 Nigeria’s National Conference in Abuja. He delivered the 2017 Kofi Annan – Dag Hammarskjöld lecture at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana on Regional Engagement in Peacebuilding in Africa: Perspectives and Challenges. He gave the keynote address to the Chatham House/West Africa Peace and Security Network (WAPSN) Seminar on “Sahelian Security in Flux” on May 13, 2019 in London. He spoke on Scoping the Security Crisis in the Sahel. His latest book, titled Urbanism and Crisis Management in Africa, was published in 2019 by the Pan African University Press in Texas, USA.