Oluwafunmilayo Olonisakin was born on 8 February 1965 in South London to Nigerian parents, the child of two worlds long before she chose to spend her career moving between them. She would go on to become a scholar, feminist, institution-builder, and one of the most consequential voices in African peace and security studies, a woman whose work has shaped how the United Nations, the African Union and a generation of universities think about conflict, leadership, and the meaning of security itself.
She is Vice President (Global Engagement) and Professor of Security, Leadership and Development at King’s College London, the first Black woman to hold a full professorship at the institution, and the founder of the African Leadership Centre, a Nairobi and London institution that has trained hundreds of the continent’s next generation of scholars and policymakers. Her story is not simply a record of degrees and titles; it is the story of a woman who insisted, at every stage, that Africa’s knowledge about its own conflicts had to be built by Africans and who built the institutions to make that possible.
Roots: The Soil That Shaped Two Worlds
Though she was born in London, Olonisakin’s earliest understanding of power, exclusion, and injustice was shaped in Nigeria, in village settings where she found herself asking questions long before she had the language of scholarship to frame them: why could girls not watch the dancing masquerade that boys were permitted to see? Why did older men preside over spaces that women had built and sustained? Why did so few young people ever realise the futures they so passionately pursued? These were not abstract puzzles. They were the seeds of a lifelong preoccupation with who gets to decide, who is left out of the room, and what is left unsaid.
Her academic instincts were, from the beginning, tethered to lived reality rather than theory for its own sake, a habit of mind that would eventually carry her from a political science lecture hall in Ile-Ife to the corridors of the UN Security Council.
Education: From Ile-Ife to King’s College London
Olonisakin’s formal education began at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science in 1984. She later moved to King’s College London, where a new chapter in her intellectual journey began. Six years after, Funmi earned a Master’s degree in War Studies and, in 1996, became the first African woman to earn a PhD in War Studies from the institution.
“I was the first African woman to receive a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.”
Beyond becoming a pioneer in a male-dominated field, she also became one of the African voices in a study area of peace and security in Africa largely shaped by Western perspectives and case studies.
A research stint at the Institute for Strategic Studies at the University of Pretoria further deepened her engagement with African security scholarship. In 2003, she returned to the university that would become the institutional base for the next phase of her distinguished academic career.
A Career Built on Bridging Two Worlds
Between 1999 and 2003, Olonisakin worked in the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, managing the Africa unit during one of the most turbulent chapters of Sierra Leone’s post-war transition. She helped establish the National Commission for War Affected Children and the Child Protection Unit within ECOWAS work that placed her inside the machinery of an institution she would later criticise for structurally underrepresenting the very continent it claimed to serve.
Returning to King’s College London in April 2003, she became Director of the Conflict, Security and Development Group, a post she held for a decade. It was during this period, in 2010, that she founded the African Leadership Centre (ALC), a partnership between King’s and the University of Nairobi built on a simple but overlooked premise: that Africa’s youthful population needed its own pipeline of scholars trained to understand its conflicts from the inside, rather than merely inheriting frameworks built elsewhere. The Centre’s early backers were unambiguous about its significance. Carnegie Corporation’s Africa grantmaking director, Tade Akin Aina, called it one of the most enriching leadership programmes anywhere on the continent:
“The ALC delivers one of the most inspiring and enriching leadership programs for peace, security, conflict and development in Africa. It brings together the best of international training with local knowledge and is well positioned to play a leading role in developing African voices, leadership and knowledge in the field.”
Beyond King’s, Olonisakin advised the African Union directly, contributing to its Common African Defence Policy, and was appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2015 to the UN Advisory Group of Experts reviewing the Peacebuilding Architecture. And in 2016 she had a seat on the Advisory Group of Experts for the UN Progress Study on Youth, Peace, and Security. For much of the field’s history, Black African women in peace and security had worked either in the field itself or through NGOs, rarely as tenured advisers to continental and global bodies at once. That Olonisakin held these positions while simultaneously running an academic centre in London made her one of the first Black African women to hold both forms of access, together with the policy room and the lecture hall, a dual standing that remains rare.
“Africa’s footprint on the UN Security Council’s agenda was hugely disproportionate to the continent’s representation in the places where decisions about the destiny of Africans were being made. To borrow from an African proverb, the heads of Africans were being shaven in their absence by those claiming to be good hair dressers.”
Leadership and Mentorship
In 2018, Olonisakin delivered her inaugural lecture at King’s College London titled “Leadership and ‘Conversation’ in Dialogue: Securing Peace in the Unromantic Context” becoming the first Black woman to do so and, by extension, the institution’s first Black woman to be named a full professor. But by then her reputation had already travelled well beyond Bush House. The late Ghanaian president J. J. Rawlings had taken to boasting about her at dinners years earlier, an introduction that led scholar Paul Zeleza to invite her to deliver the keynote address at the 2018 TOFAC conference in Nairobi. Nigerian historian Toyin Falola, writing after her lecture, described her as one of the most respected scholars of peace and social security anywhere in the world.
Since December 2017, she has served as Vice President (Global Engagement) at King’s, directing the deployment of the university’s knowledge and talent in service of societies well beyond its own walls, while continuing to mentor a growing corps of ALC fellows who go on to mentor the cohorts that follow them a self-renewing, transnational pipeline of African peace and security scholars that did not meaningfully exist before she built it.
“Africa needs its talented, creative young people to become the next generation of leaders and bring real change to their communities. The African Leadership Centre is there to help them develop the skills they will need to take on that responsibility.”
— Prof. ‘Funmi Olonisakin, on why she founded the African Leadership Centre
Recognition Well Earned
The world has found many ways to acknowledge Olonisakin’s contribution. In 2010, King’s College London named her the recipient of its Award for International Collaboration of the Year for founding the ALC. She was named the University of Pretoria’s Mellon Foundation Distinguished Scholar on Peace and Conflict between 2013 and 2015, received the King’s College London Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015, and was appointed an ExtraOrdinary Professor at Pretoria the following year. She has been named to the Powerlist Britain’s list of the most influential people of African and African-Caribbean heritage in three consecutive years, 2019 to 2021, and was awarded a Fellowship of King’s College London in 2020. In 2022, the University of Pretoria conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Philosophy, in recognition of her contributions to peace, security, justice and international solidarity in Africa, with particular reference to women and youth.
Among the more than ten books she has authored or edited, one has travelled furthest beyond the academy. Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone: The Story of UNAMSIL, published in 2008, grew out of what stands as the first inside account of a UN peacekeeping operation and the book has since become something of an operational guide, circulated among UN practitioners themselves, a rare instance of a scholar’s fieldwork feeding directly back into the practice it studied. Other notable titles include Women, Peace and Security: Translating Policy into Practice (2011), Women and Security Governance in Africa (2011), Militancy and Violence in West Africa (2013), and Security Sector Transformation in Africa (2010).
Roots That Reach Back
Though her career has flourished largely in London, Olonisakin’s commitment to Nigeria has never wavered. She sits on the board of the Olusegun Obasanjo Leadership Institute in Nigeria and the Pan-African University Press, and her ALC Fellowship for African Women has drawn many of its brightest cohorts from Nigerian universities. In the aftermath of the 2020 #EndSARS protests, she offered not just critique but a constructive roadmap, saying:
“Notwithstanding our recent tragedies, it is not too late to turn the situation around, provided the governing elite can fundamentally shift their mindset towards a commitment to a new national security conversation.”
Truth-telling about the Lekki shootings, an active Police Council, and a year-long, citizen-inclusive national security conversation she considered as practical paths toward a more trusted Nigerian state.
Through the ALC and its Nigerian fellows, young researchers across the Southwest have drawn direct inspiration from her journey, proof that the distance between a King’s College professorship and a Nigerian village dialogue is, in her own life, no distance at all.
Conclusion
Oluwafunmilayo ‘Funmi’ Olonisakin was born the child of Nigerian parents in a South London that offered her little reason to expect a career spent moving between UN Security Council chambers, King’s College lecture halls and Nigerian boardrooms. Today, she is the first Black woman to hold a full professorship at King’s College London, the founder of an institution that has trained hundreds of African scholars, and a voice consulted by UN Secretaries-General and Nigerian leadership institutions alike on how peace is actually built.
Her journey from Ile-Ife to King’s College London is not a story about leaving Nigeria behind. It is a story about carrying Africa’s questions into rooms that had rarely made space for them and building the institutions to make sure the next generation would not have to ask permission to be there. Four decades on, she is still doing exactly that.
References
https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/531644-funmi-olonisakin-the-mainframe-of-global-success-by-toyin-falola.html
https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-04-09-you-don-t-get-what-you-deserve-you-get-what-you-negotiate/
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2024-09/how-african-leader-can-make-commonwealth-relevant-again
https://unu.edu/conversation-series/how-will-perspectives-peace-and-state-change-among-leaders-future
https://guardian.ng/news/nigeria/violent-peaceful-protests-rooted-in-leadership-failure/