Tone Sommerfelt is a senior researcher at PRIO and a social anthropologist with over two decades of fieldwork experience across West Africa and the Caribbean.

Her research sits at the intersection of political anthropology, migration studies, temporality, and the anthropology of development. A central thread is how people orient themselves toward uncertain futures: how expectations, anticipations, and unfulfilled plans shape everyday life and political behaviour in the present, and how these future orientations are entangled with questions of power, memory, and the weight of the past. This concern with temporality has driven projects on migration and displacement, including Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI), led by Jørgen Carling, which traced how migration plans that may never materialise nonetheless shape individual biographies and societal change in Cape Verde, Ghana, and The Gambia.

She also examines the political economy of global environmental funding, and how international financing practices for biodiversity and environmental protection shape dynamics on the ground, and with what consequences for the communities and ecosystems they are meant to serve. These questions are part of a broader interest in how external pressures and transnational processes – including debates on religion, ethnicity, and emigration – are filtered through state-society relations and feed into political processes, particularly in African societies.

Her primary ethnographic home is West Africa, where she has conducted long-term fieldwork in rural, peri-urban, and urban settings in The Gambia, as well as shorter-term fieldwork in Ghana and Mali. Drawing on her command of Wolof, she brings linguistic depth to her ethnographic work in the Gambia-Senegal region. This fieldwork has generated sustained engagements with questions of kinship, family, and the material dimensions of social life: how resources, objects, and economic relations are woven into the fabric of everyday relatedness. She also has extensive experience in applied research on global child protection – including child labour, street-living children, and child soldiering – with projects spanning Haiti, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Morocco, and Jordan.

Tone holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo and has held research positions at the University of Oxford (visiting fellow, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the International Gender Studies Centre at Queen Elizabeth House) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (postdoctoral fellow).