Dr Valentin Clavé-Mercier, a former PhD candidate in CISRUL’s Political Concepts in the World (POLITICO) project, is in a new role as Lecturer in Political Studies at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Valentin’s role, which began in September 2025, involves teaching several subjects, including “Political Ideologies” (BA Political Science), “Political Actors and Processes” (BA Political Science) and “Research Techniques and Academic Writing” (MA Nationalism and National Identities). This follows his role as a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher with the research group ‘MOVICON – Movilización, Contienda Política y Cambio Social’, and as a postdoctoral researcher for the Horizon 2020 research project ‘JUSTNORTH – Toward a Just, Ethical and Sustainable Arctic.’
As Valentin describes, his research broadly concerns ‘how non-Western and decolonial political ontologies and praxis contribute to the rearticulation of contemporary political thought and political imaginaries’, with his most recent research focusing on the articulation of prefigurative politics in Indigenous collective action, specifically in the deployment of Indigenous grassroots responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition to completing his PhD thesis on Indigenous sovereignty at CISRUL, titled ‘Sovereignty otherwise: Discourses and practices of Tino Rangatiratanga in the Māori politics of sovereignty’, he co-organised an interdisciplinary conference at the centre in 2019 on ‘Decolonising Political Concepts.’ The conference featured keynotes Dr Ritu Vij and Professor Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and a workshop led by Professor Julie Cupples. Along with co-organiser Dr Marie Wuth, he went on to edit a volume of the same name, with contributions from some of the conference participants. He has also authored research articles published in Ethnopolitics, Review of International Studies, International Theory or Contemporary Politics, among others.
To read more about Valentin’s work and to get in touch, visit his CISRUL profile here.