Editorial Board
Co-Editors
George M. Bob-Milliar
[email protected]
Department of History & Political Studies
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
PMB, University Post Office
Kumasi-Ghana
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7374-1369
Jonathan Fisher
[email protected]
Professor of Global Security
International Development Department
School of Government
Muirhead Tower
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham,
B15 2TT, United Kingdom
Amanda Lea Robinson
Associate Professor of Political Science
Ohio State University
Columbus, OH, USA
www.amandalearobinson.org
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8315-7753
Gabrielle Lynch
Professor of Comparative Politics
University of Warwick, UK
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/lynch/
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8475-1810
Editorial Assistant
Busani Mpofu
[email protected]
AMRI, College of Graduate Studies
University of South Africa
Robert Sobukwe (Vista) Building
263 Nana Sita (Skinner) Street
Pretoria
South Africa. 0001.
Book Reviews
Dr Folashadé Soulé
[email protected]
Blavatnik School of Government
University of Oxford
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter
Woodstock Road
Oxford
OX2 6GG
Publishers: Sending books for review
Editorial Advisory Board
Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai
Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on the intersection between politics and development, with particular focus on spatial inequalities, natural resource governance, social policy and social protection, democratization, and urban governance. He is the co-author of Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2018). His work has been published by several top-ranked international journals, including African Affairs; Politics & Policy, New Political Economy, Democratization, Development Policy Review; European Journal of Development Research; Journal of International Development, and Labour, Capital and Society. His article on the politics of Ghana's education sector won the prestigious Gerti Hesseling Prize (2017) awarded for the best journal article by an African scholar published in an AEGIS-affiliated academic Journal. He also received the runner-up position for African Affairs' African Author Prize for best paper published in 2016/2017. He holds a First Class Bachelors degree in Political Science from the University of Ghana (Legon, Accra), an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a PhD in Development Policy and Management from the University of Manchester (UK).
Rita Abrahamsen
Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS). Her research interests are in African politics, security and development, security privatization and postcolonial theory. She is the author (with M.C. Williams) of Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and the Good Governance Agenda in Africa (Zed Books, 2000). Her articles have appeared in leading journals including African Affairs, Alternatives, International Political Sociology, Journal of Modern African Studies, Political Studies, Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly, and the Review of African Political Economy. She was joint-editor of African Affairs from 2009 to 2014. Prior to joining the University of Ottawa, she was in the Department of International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth, and she has been visiting fellow at the University of Cape Town, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Queensland in Brisbane, the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo, the Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) at the University of Copenhagen, Queen Mary University of London and University of Sydney.
Nana Akua Anyidoho
Nana Akua Anyidoho is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana. She holds a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. She has an interest in the interaction of human lives and policy contexts, and her research frequently explores themes of agency, participation, inclusion and empowerment. Her recent research has been in the area of young people's employment aspirations, transitions and trajectories, with a focus on graduates of higher education and young people in rural agriculture. She has also published on feminist activism, policy discourses and practices around women's empowerment, and women's informal work. Her approach is interdisciplinary, combining training in Social Policy, Developmental Psychology and African Studies, and in qualitative and quantitative methodologies. She has presented her work internationally; held visiting fellowships at Boston University, Penn State University, and the University of Sussex; and carried out commissioned research for the Government of Ghana, the World Bank, UNECA, DFID, IDRC and Cadbury Schweppes, among others. Dr. Anyidoho is currently the President of the Ghana Studies Association, a cognate organization of the African Studies Association.
Leonardo R. Arriola
Leonardo R. Arriola is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently serves as the Chair of the African Politics Conference Group (APCG), an organized section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and an affiliate of the African Studies Association (ASA). His research focuses on democratization, governance, and violence in African countries. He is author of Multiethnic Coalitions in Africa: Business Financing of Opposition Election Campaigns (Cambridge University Press 2013), which received an award for best book on African Politics in 2013 and an honorable mention for the Gregory Luebbert Prize for best book in Comparative Politics in 2014. His work has also been published in journals like the American Journal of Political Science and World Politics.
Katie Baldwin
Kate Baldwin is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University, where she is also a faculty fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Her current research projects analyze politics in weak states, examining how non-state actors – such as traditional leaders, churches and NGOs – interact with the state to affect development and democracy. She is the author of the book The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and articles in numerous journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies and World Development. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.
Alexander Beresford
Alexander Beresford is Associate Professor in African Politics in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on themes such as democratization and governance in Africa, as well as African agency in international relations. In particular, he has made contributions to scholarship about South African political economy, including South Africa's Political Crisis: Unfinished Liberation and Fractured Class Struggles (Springer, 2015). His work has also explored the dynamics of liberation movements in Africa (Democratization) and the role that African actors have played in shaping and contesting transitional justice (Review of International Studies). Before joining Leeds, he studied for his doctorate in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Rachel Beatty Riedl
Rachel Beatty Riedl is the Einaudi Center's director and John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor in the Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research interests include institutions in democracies and autocracies, local governance and decentralization policy, authoritarian regime legacies and democratic resilience, and religion and politics, with a regional focus in Africa. Previously, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the Yale Program on Democracy, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a full member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as Chair of the Democracy and Autocracy section of the American Political Science Association. Riedl is co-host of the podcast Ufahamu Africa, featuring weekly episodes of news highlights and interviews about life and politics on the African continent.
Biniam E. Bedasso
Biniam E. Bedasso is a researcher at the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) based in Pretoria, South Africa. He leads CABRI's flagship research and assessment program on the institutional capabilities of African countries for public financial management. He has wide-ranging experience in academia, think tanks and international organizations in a number of countries across three continents. Prior to joining CABRI, Biniam was a Global Leaders Fellow at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. In 2012, he was a Robert McNamara scholar of the World Bank. His scholarly works have appeared in reputable peer-reviewed journals as well as popular outlets such as Project Syndicate. He was the recipient of African Affairs African Author Prize for 2015-16. Biniam received a PhD in Public Policy from Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Morten Bøås
Morten Bøås is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Bøås works on politics and conflict in Africa and the Middle East. He has extensive field experience from Africa where he has worked in several countries in conflict, including DR Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda. Bøås has led several major Norwegian Research Council-funded projects; he was a research staff member in the EU-funded MICROCON project, he has worked extensively for international organisations like the UN and the World Bank, and he is currently the project manager and scientific co-ordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 funded project EUNPACK: In addition to the many articles in peer-reviewed journal, his publications include African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine (Lynne Rienner, 2007, co-edited with Kevin Dunn), International Development Vols I–IV (Sage, 2010, co-edited with Benedicte Bull), The Politics of Origin in Africa (Zed Books, 2013, co-authored with Kevin Dunn), The Politics of Conflict Economies: Miners, Merchants and Warriors in the African Borderland (Routledge 2015) and Africa's Insurgents: Navigating an Evolving Landscape (Lynne Rienner, 2017), co-edited with Kevin Dunn.
Catherine Boone
Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She works on issues of African political economy, and is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930-1985 (Cambridge 1993), Political Topographies of the African State (Cambridge 2003), and Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics (Cambridge 2014) as well as articles and book chapters. She is past president of the West Africa Research Association and has served on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. She convenes the MSc in African Development at the LSE and is now studying territorial dynamics and problems related to spatial inequalities in African countries.
Nic Cheeseman
Nic Cheeseman (@fromagehomme) is Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham, and was formerly the Director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He mainly works on democracy, elections and development, including a range of topics such as election rigging, political campaigning, corruption, “fake news” and presidential rule. The articles that he has published based on this research have won a number of prizes including the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratization (2015). Professor Cheeseman is also the author or editor of more than ten books, including How to Rig an Election (2018) – selected as one of the books of the year by the Spectator magazine. In recognition of this academic and public contribution, the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom awarded him the prestigious Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding professional achievement in 2019. In recent years he has also won the Celebrating Impact prize of the Economic and Social Research Council for “outstanding international impact” and the Josiah Mason Award for Academic Advancement. A frequent commentator democracy, elections and global events, Professor Cheeseman’s analysis has appeared in the Economist, Le Monde, Financial Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, Daily Nation and he writes a regular column for the Africa Report and the Mail&Guardian. Many of his interviews and insights can be found on the website that he founded and co-edits, www.democracyinafrica.org.
Florence Dafe
Florence Dafe is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Munich. Her research interests revolve around finance and development, especially the question how much policy space governments in African countries have in governing their financial sectors in a context of globalization and financialization. Prior to joining the TUM, she was a Fellow in International Political Economy at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London. Florence is also an associate researcher at the German Development Institute and a honorary research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick. She has conducted policy analysis and advisory work for DFID, the German International Cooperation, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including the Review of International Political Economy, Regulation and Governance and the Journal of Development Studies.
Justine Maisha Davis
Justine Maisha Davis is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) at the University of Michigan, where she will be an Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Political Science starting in the fall of 2022. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, was a UC presidential postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and holds a master’s degree from the American University of Paris and la Sorbonne-Paris I. Her research interests include electoral violence, civil society, and the challenges to democratization efforts in post-conflict settings and weakly institutionalized democracies. Her dissertation, “Wartime Experiences of Civic Leaders: Legacies of Civil War, Rebel Control, and Democratization in Post-Conflict Africa,” won the Western Political Science Association best dissertation award in 2020. She also won the Ralph Bunche Best Graduate Student Paper in 2018 Award from the African Politics Conference Group, an organized section of the American Political Science Association and the African Studies Association. Her research has been published in African Affairs, Party Politics, and the South African Geographical Journal.
Carl Death
Carl Death is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Recent books include The Green State in Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Global Justice: The Basics (Routledge, 2016, with Huw L. Williams), Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, Protests and Power at the World Summit (Routledge, 2010) and three edited collections, The African Affairs Reader: Key Texts in Politics, Development and International Relations (OUP, 2017, with Nic Cheeseman and Lindsay Whitfield), Critical Environmental Politics (Routledge, 2014), and Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal interventions, state-building and civil society (Routledge, 2014, with Clive Gabay). He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at The MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University; the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; Stellenbosch University; and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.
Julia Gallagher
Julia Gallagher is Professor of African Politics at SOAS University of London. Her research focuses on state-building and state-society relations in Africa. She has written about Western ideas and images of Africa, China in Africa, and on Zimbabwe's politics and international relations. Her latest book, Zimbabwe's International Relations: fantasy, reality and the making of the state, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She currently works on the politics of state buildings and architecture in Africa and has published work on aesthetics and the state in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia and South Africa.
Tom Goodfellow
Tom Goodfellow is a Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the comparative political economy of urban development in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, migration, and urban institutional change. He is author of Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa (Oxford University Press, 2022) and co-author of Cities and Development (Routledge 2016). He sits on the Editorial Boards of African Affairs and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is Treasurer of the IJURR Foundation.
Hazel Gray
Hazel Gray is a Lecturer in African Studies and Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her research interests cover African political economy, institutions, comparative economic development and change and industrial policy. She studied at Oxford University and at SOAS, London. Her book Turbulence and Order in Economic Development will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Critical African Studies. She was a lead author for Tanzania's Human Development Report in 2014 and 2017 and she is on the Technical Advisory Board of the Economic and Social Research Foundation in Dar es Salaam. Prior to working in academia she worked as an economist at the Ministry of Finance in Tanzania.
Morten Jerven
Morten Jerven is the Chair of Africa and International Development at University of Edinburgh. He is an economic historian, and has published widely on the patterns and the measurement of African economic development including a recent book, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, published by Cornell University Press in 2013. Jerven's second book, Economic Growth and Measurement Reconsidered in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, 1965-1995, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. His third book,Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong was released by Zed Books in 2015. He has also edited Measuring African Development: Past and Present and Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development (the latter with Deborah Johnston) which were published by Routledge in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
Tim Kelsall
Tim Kelsall is interested in cultures of accountability in Africa and the Third World and his research focuses on the areas of economic development and transitional justice, especially in Tanzania and Sierra Leone. He holds a PhD from the University of London (SOAS), has taught politics at the Universities of Oxford and Newcastle, and is a former editor of African Affairs. He is the author of Contentious Politics, Local Governance, and the Self: a Tanzanian case study (Nordic African Institute, Uppsala, 2005) and Culture Under Cross-Examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), as well as several articles published in journals including Africa, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Human Rights Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, and Development Policy Review. He is currently living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working freelance as an Associate of the Africa, Power and Politics Programme (http://www.institutions-africa.org/) and as a Visiting Fellow of the War Crimes Studies Center, University of California at Berkeley.
Cherry Leonardi
Cherry Leonardi is a Senior Lecturer in African History at Durham University. Her book, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State (James Currey, 2013), is the result of a doctoral and postdoctoral research project funded by the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the British Academy. In 2010 she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and in 2009-10 she was the lead researcher and author of a report on local justice in South Sudan for the US Institute of Peace and the Rift Valley Institute. Her current and future research focuses on issues of land and territoriality, and histories of trade and exchange in South Sudan.
Zachariah Mampilly
Zachariah Mampilly is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, CUNY and a member of the doctoral faculty in the Department of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the Co-Founder of the Program on African Social Research.
Peace A. Medie
Peace A. Medie is a scholar and a writer. She is associate professor in politics at the University of Bristol. She studies state and non-state actors’ responses to gender-based violence and other forms of insecurity in countries in Africa. She is author of ‘Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa’ (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her debut novel, His Only Wife, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020. Her second novel, Nightbloom, was published in June 2023.
Andreas Mehler
Andreas Mehler is Professor of Political Science at the University of Freiburg and director of the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute. He was the director the GIGA Institute of African Affairs (2002-2015). He is Co-Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Africa Spectrum and of the Africa Yearbook (Brill, Leiden). His fields of interest are peace processes in Africa south of the Sahara (particularly power-sharing pacts); Security, State and Statehood; and French and German Africa Policies. His articles have appeared in journals such as African Affairs, Journal of Modern African Studies, Armed Forces and Society or Ethnopolitics. He served in the boards of the Africa Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (2008-16) and the African Studies Association in Germany (2000-2016).
Laurie Nathan
Dr Laurie Nathan is Professor of the Practice of Mediation and Director of the Mediation Program at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. He was previously Professor and Director of the Centre for Mediation in Africa at Pretoria University. He has served on the Advisory Council of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch; the Carter Centre’s International Council for Conflict Resolution; the Expert Advisory Group of the UNDP Democratic Governance Practice Network; the Board of Conciliation Resources; and the UN Academic Advisory Council on Mediation. His research has been published in African Affairs, Contemporary Security Policy, European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, Global Policy, Human Rights Quarterly, International Affairs, International Peacekeeping, International Studies Review, Swiss Political Science Review and Third World Quarterly.
Insa Nolte
Insa Nolte is Reader in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, UK, and Visiting Professor at Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, Nigeria. Insa is the President of the African Studies Association of the UK (2016-18) and the Vice Chair of the UK Council of Areas Studies Associations. Dr Nolte's research focuses on the importance of everyday encounters and interpersonal relationships for wider social and political processes in Africa, and she is currently investigating how differences and encounters between Yoruba Muslims, Christians and traditionalists inform social identities shaped by locality, gender, and generation. She is the author of Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: The Local Politics of a Nigerian Nationalist (2009) and the lead editor of Beyond Religious Tolerance: Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists in an African Town (2017).
Faith I. Okpotor
Faith I. Okpotor is an assistant professor of political science at Moravian College and a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project. She studies political violence and international security with a special emphasis on Africa. Her current research examines the dynamics of post-election violence in Africa. Her other research interests include US foreign policy, postcolonial IR theory, feminist IR theory and research methodology. She has been published in African Conflict and Peace Building Review, Africa Today, Air and Space Power Journal - Africa and Francophonie, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, and in the edited volume, The United States' Foreign Policy in Africa in the 21st Century: Issues and Perspectives (Carolina Academic Press, 2014). She is a recipient of the Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar Award from the United States Institute of Peace and has also received research support from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative. A member of the Professional Development Committee of the International Studies Association (2019-2021), she holds an MA and PhD in political science and international relations from the University of Delaware, an MS in journalism from Northwestern University, and a BA from Hampshire College.
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Professor of the International Politics of Africa at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; Official Fellow of St Peter's College; and a Fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. He is the co-director of the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on African Governance and a former editor of African Affairs. He has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust/British Academy Senior Research Fellowship for 2023-24. He is the author of Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War (2015) and Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (2007) and co-editor of China Returns to Africa (2008). He is currently writing a book titled Africa Offshore: The Global Offshore Economy and the Reshaping of African Politics. His individual and collaborative work has received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the ESRC, the Joffe Trust, the Volkswagen Foundation, the FCDO, the British Academy, among others.
Folashadé Soulé
Folashadé Soulé is a Senior Research Associate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her areas of research are across International Relations and International Political Economy and her research interests are in Africa's International Relations, global governance, and more recently the intersectional study of negotiation practices, agency and bureaucratic politics in Africa-China studies. She has published in several journals, including Global Governance, Foro Internacional, Afrique Contemporaine and Cahiers des Amériques Latines. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the London School of Economics and Political Science and as an Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders fellow. She has taught at Sciences Po Paris, Université de Lille II, Université Catholique de Paris, INALCO, the University of Abomey-Calavi, and at the University of Cape Town/London School of Economics summer school and the Xi'an Jiaotong /University of Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall) summer school programme. As a policy-facing academic, she has acted as an international strategy consultant for several international organisations and trained young diplomats and civil servants in Bamako in methodology and international relations. She serves on the board of the International Studies Association's (ISA) Committee of Engagement with the Global South.
Miles Tendi
Miles Tendi is Associate Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford. Tendi is mainly interested in civil-military relations, intelligence studies and biographical research. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies. Tendi's second single authored book, An African Liberation Fighter: Solomon Mujuru and the Transnational Liberation Wars, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
Thomas Kwasi Tieku
Thomas Kwasi Tieku is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in King’s University College at The University of Western Ontario (UWO) and a Carnegie-Diaspora Scholar in the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy (LECIAD) at the University of Ghana, Legon. A former Director of African Studies at the University of Toronto, where he won the Excellence of Teaching Award, Tieku’s current research focuses on informal international relations, IR theory, international organizations and mediation. He is an award-winning author who has authored, edited or co-edited 5 books, and written over 40 refereed book chapters, and journal articles, including The Legon School of International Relations which won the 2021 Review of International Studies Best Article Prize. His latest co-edited book is The Politics of Peacebuilding in Africa. He has consulted for several organizations including the World Bank Group, the United Nations, and the Canadian as well as the American governments.
Nicholas Westcott
Nicholas Westcott is Professor of Practice in the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, and at the Oxford University is an Associate of the Department of Politics and International Relations, and a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. He was Director of the Royal African Society from 2017-2023. From 2011-17 he was Managing Director in the EU’s External Action Service in Brussels, firstly for Africa and then for the Middle East and North Africa. After completing a PhD in African history at Cambridge University, he worked from 1982-2011 for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in a number of posts in London, Brussels, Washington DC and in Africa, including (from 2008) as British High Commissioner to Ghana and Ambassador to Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo. He was a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2021-2, and is a Board member of the African Centre for Economic Transformation. He is the author of Imperialism and Development: The East African Groundnuts Scheme and its Legacy (James Currey, 2020) and articles on African history and British and European foreign policy. He tweets @NickWestcott4.
Lindsay Whitfield
Lindsay Whitfield is Professor (with special responsibilities) at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University (Denmark), where she leads the Centre of African Economies. Her research interests are economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on firm-level technological capabilities, industrialization and industrial policy, export diversification and participation in global value chains, state-business relations and political settlements. Her books include Economies after Colonialism: Ghana and the Struggle for Power (Cambridge University Press, 2018); The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (Oxford University Press, 2009). She was an editor of African Affairs from 2015 to 2020.
Prof. Michael Woldemariam
Michael Woldemariam is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International & Security Studies at Maryland. Woldemariam’s teaching and research interests are in African security studies, with a particular focus on armed conflict in the Horn of Africa. Woldemariam’s scholarly work has been published in a wide-range of peer-reviewed journals, most recently in Contemporary Security Policy and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. His popular essays have appeared in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Current History. His first book, Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa: Rebellion and Its Discontents, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. In addition to his scholarly work, Woldemariam has consulted with a number of international organizations, primarily on issues related to politics, governance, and security in the Greater Horn of Africa region. He holds a BA from Beloit College, and MA and PhD degrees from Princeton University. Prior to joining SPP, Woldemariam was a faculty member at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and the Director of its African Studies Center. He has also worked as a research specialist with Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies program and held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Penn State’s African Research Center. In 2020-21, Woldemariam served on the Democratic staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship.
Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is associate professor of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. Her research is broadly in the fields of international relations and gender and African studies, while her work focuses on women in conflict and peace, African refugees, African feminisms, and comparative politics in Africa. Olajumoke’s most recent publications are African Refugees (Indiana University Press, 2023) and the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies (Palgrave, 2021). She is co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, the Rowman and Littlefield book series, “Africa: Past, Present and Prospects,” and editorial board member for several journals. Olajumoke was Global South Scholar-in-Residence at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral fellow at Rhodes University, South Africa, Visiting Professor at the Rapoport Centre for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, Presidential Fellow of the African Studies Association, and so on. Her research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the University for Peace Africa Program, the African Association of Political Science (AAPS), and more. Olajumoke is currently Vice-President Elect of the International Studies Association (ISA), steering committee member of the Women in Refugee Law Network, former co-Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the ISA, as well as former head of the Department of Political Science and dean of the School of Social Sciences at Babcock University. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Ibadan.
