ASAFA JALATA is a Professor of Sociology and Global and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a leading scholar on the politics and societies of Oromia, Ethiopia, Horn of Africa and international issues, and he is a world-renowned expert on Oromo studies. Furthermore, Jalata, as a leading social scientist in the fields of indigenous and human rights studies, Africana and global studies, and nationalism and terrorism studies, is engaged in identifying and explaining the chains of historical and political economic forces that shape racial inequality, development, underdevelopment, and social/national movements on local, regional, and global levels.

Jalata has published and edited eight books including Contending Nationalisms of Oromia and Ethiopia: Struggling for Statehood, Sovereignty, and Multinational Democracy (2010), Oromummaa: Oromo Culture, Identity and Nationalism (2007), Oromia and Ethiopia:State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict (2005 [1993]), and Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (2011 [2001]). He has also published more than five dozens of refereed articles and book chapters.

His refereed articles have appeared in national, regional or continental, and international journals such as The Journal of Oromo Studies, Horn of Africa, The Northeast Journal of African Studies, The African Studies Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The International Journal of Comparative Sociology, The Journal of Black Studies, Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches, Social Justice, Sociology Mind, Sociologists Without Border/Sociologos Sin Fronteras, Humanity and Society, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, The Journal of Political and Military Sociology, and Nations and Nationalism.

Jalata is currently engaged in writing a book entitled Cultural Capital and Democracy in Oromia, Ethiopia and Botswana.