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Professor Jalata’s research agenda is focused on investigating and understanding the dynamic interplay between the racialized/ethnicized and exploitative global and regional economic structures and the human agencies of the colonized/ indigenous peoples.  He has been identifying and explaining the chains of historical and political economic forces shaping racial/ ethnonational inequality, development and under-development, and national and social movements on global, regional, and local levels.  Specifically, for the last twenty years, he has been researching and exploring the relationship between the colonization and incorporation of Oromia, the Oromo country, into the Ethiopian Empire and the global capitalist system and the development of the Oromo national movement.

To link his regional research activities with his larger research agenda, Professor Jalata has located the Oromo question in the global context.  His book, Oromia & Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-1992 (2004) (1993, 2005), his edited book, Oromo nationalism and the Ethiopian Democracy: The Search of Freedom and Democracy  (1998), and other publications demonstrate the relationship among local, regional, and global issues.  He has extended the scope of his research to include the Horn of Africa and North America.  His book, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (2001), and his articles, "Ethnonationalism and the Global ‘Modernizing’ Project" (2001),  "Two Liberation Movements Compared: Oromia & Southern Sudan," (2000),  “Revisiting the Black Struggle: Lessons for the twenty-first Century,” and “Comparing the African American and the Oromo Movements in the global Context,” Vol. 30, No. 1, 2003: 67-111, illustrate this geographical breadth.

In his new edited book, State Crises, Globalisation, and National Movements in North-East Horn of Africa, (2004), Professor Jalata extends his scholarship and expertise beyond Oromia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Black America to the broader geopolitical region and sociocultural area of North-East Africa.  He is currently engaged in researching and writing a book entitled, Faces of Terrorism in the Age of Globalization: From Christopher Columbus to Osma bin Laden. His research is focused on the roles of the indigenous peoples in the racialized global capitalist system, and how the agencies of these peoples are affecting the structures and the dynamics of the system.  The uniqueness and strength of his contributions are that he seriously engages scholars and politicians of various theoretical orientations to understand the main reasons why subjugated peoples are involved in cultural and political struggles. Professor Jalata has already consolidated his scholarly stature among national and international scholars as a leading sociologist/social scientist in the fields of Oromo and African studies. In recognition of his contribution to Oromo scholarship, he received the Oromo Studies Association Award in 2002.