Obituary: Professor Maxi Schoeman, University of Pretoria
It is with deep sadness that I have learned of the passing away, on September 14th, of my dear colleague and friend, Professor Maxi Schoema, of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria (UP), in South Africa. Maxi had earned her doctorate at the prestigious Aberystwyth University in Wales and worked as a researcher and professor at UP since 2000. She had a highly influential academic career, known in several capitals across the African continent and beyond for her studies on South African foreign policy, African peace and security, gender and security.
Gifted with great intellectual capacity, she was also very generous and skilled in forming international research networks, always involving researchers from other countries in the South. She was with us at IESP-UERJ in 2019, as part of the CAPES Print Program, and gave lectures on the foreign policy of regional powers. He welcomed two of our young researchers, Pablo de Rezende Saturnino Braga and Murilo Gomes da Costa (then a doctoral student under the supervision of Maria Regina Soares de Lima), when they were in Pretoria on a doctoral scholarship to conduct comparative research on Brazil and South Africa. A tireless intellectual and researcher, Maxi held research grants at the University of Cambridge, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, and the Universities of Uppsala, Indiana, and Beijing.
A South African reference in the field of International Relations, Maxi Schoeman will be missed by many of us. In addition, we will have the academic duty of completing a book we were working on collectively, on the issue of oceans as new regions of the world’s geoeconomics and geopolitics. This book will be another opportunity to remember her important contributions to the critical understanding of international politics from the perspective of African countries in general and South Africa in particular.