Shirt a Phobia

Sample Page

Nic Cheeseman is a British political scientist and professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on democracy, elections and African politics. He is a columnist for The Africa Report and South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, and is the editor of the website Democracy in Africa.[1]

Education and career

Cheeseman studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, where he also completed an MPhil and DPhil in politics. He was elected as a Cox Fellow at New College, and in 2006 held a position at Jesus College, Oxford, as an associate professor of African politics. During his time at Oxford, he served as Director of the African Studies Centre. In January 2017, he joined the University of Birmingham as Professor of Democracy and International Development.[2] In 2022, he became the inaugural Director of the University’s centre of Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation.

Academic work and publications

Cheeseman has held a number of visiting academic positions, including at Sciences Po, the University of Cape Town, and the Australian National University.[3] His early research focused on African politics, including his 2015 monograph Democracy in Africa. He has also published work on democracy and elections in a comparative context, including Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective with Paul Chaisty and Tim Power, and How to Rig an Election with Brian Klaas.[4]

Subsequent publications include Authoritarian Africa: Repression, Resistance and the Power of Ideas, with Jonathan Fisher in 2019, and The Moral Economy of Elections: Democracy, Voting, and Virtue, with Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis in 2020. In 2022, Cheeseman established a research project on the history of African political thought and co-founded a research network focused on ideas and ideologies in African politics.[5]

He served as co-editor African Affairs from 2012 and 2016.[6] In 2016, he was appointed founding editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press’s Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, and he was also involved in editing a book series on African politics and international relations.[7]

Between 2013 and 2017, Cheeseman wrote a bi-weekly column for Kenya’s Sunday Nation, covering topics including elections, decentralization and corruption.[8] In 2017, he resigned from the newspaper along with several colleagues, citing concerns about government censorship.[9] Since then he has written a regular column for the Africa Report, runs a collaboration with The Continent, the Pan-African Magazine, and regularly writes for South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper.[10] He also regularly writes for The Economist,[11] Le Monde,[12] Financial Times,[13] Newsweek,[14] the Washington Post,[15] New York Times,[16] and the BBC.[17]

In 2020, Cheeseman was part of a group that founded the Resistance Bureau, an international webinar series focused on issues related to political freedom and governance.[18] He also co-edits the website Democracy in Africa, which publishes analysis on African politics for a range of audiences.[19]

Awards and recognition

Cheeseman’s doctoral thesis, The rise and fall of civil-authoritarianism in Africa: patronage, participation, and political parties in Kenya and Zambia,[20] was awarded the Arthur McDougall Dissertation Prize by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom for the Best Dissertation on Elections, Electoral Systems or Representation in 2008.

In 2013, an article co-authored with Paul Chaisty and Timothy Power, titled “Rethinking the ‘presidentialism debate’: Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective”, received the Comparative Area Studies (CAS) Award for best article in the field.[21] His book How to Rig an Election was included in “books of the year” lists by Spectator[22] and the Centre for Global Development.[23]

In 2019, Cheeseman won the Joni Lovenduski Prize of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar.[24]

In 2019, Cheeseman was awarded the Joni Lovenduski Prize by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom for mid-career professional achievement. In the same year, a research team he led received the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for Outstanding International Impact for work on elections and accountability in new democracies.

In 2022, How to Rig an Election was nominated for the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and Cheeseman received the Josiah Mason Award for Academic Advancement from the University of Birmingham.[25]

He has also served on advisory bodies, including as a member of the Advisory Board of the European Democracy Hub[26][27] and the International Advisory Council of Afrobarometer.[28]

Selected publications

  • Cheeseman, Nic; Lynch, Gabrielle; Willis, Justin (2021). The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-41723-5. Retrieved 23 March 2026.
  • Cheeseman, Nic; Kanyinga, Karuti; Lynch, Gabrielle, eds. (2020). The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198815693.001.0001. ISBN 9780198815693.
  • The Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018 (Editor in Chief).[29]
  • Authoritarian Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019 (with Jonathan Fisher).[30]
  • The Oxford Dictionary of African Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018 (with Eloïse Bertrand, and Sa’eed Husaini).[31]
  • Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2018 (with Paul Chaisty and Tim Power).[32]
  • Institutions and Democratization in Africa: How the rules of the game shape political developments, Cambridge University Press, 2018 (sole editor).[33]
  • The African Affairs Reader: Key texts in politics, development, and international relations, Oxford University Press, 2017 (co-edited collection with Carl Death and Lindsay Whitfield].[34]
  •  African Politics: Major Works, Routledge, 2016 (sole editor).[35]
  •  How to Rig An Election, Yale University Press, 2018 (with Brian Klaas).[36]
  • Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures, and the struggle for political reform, Cambridge University Press, 2015.[37]
  • Politics Meets Policies: The Emergence of Programmatic Parties, International IDEA, 2014 (with Herbet Kitschelt, Dan Paget, Yi-Ting Wang, Juan Pablo Luna, Fernando Rosenblatt and Sergio Toro].[38]
  • The Handbook of African Politics, Routledge, 2013 (co-edited with David Anderson and Andrea Scheibler].[39]
  • Our Turn to Eat: Politics in Kenya Since 1950, LIT Verlag, 2010 (co-edited with Daniel Branch and Leigh Gardner].[40]

References

  1. ^ “Nicholas Cheeseman”. Kofi Annan Foundation. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  2. ^ “Professor Nic Cheeseman – International Development Department – University of Birmingham”. www.birmingham.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  3. ^ “Sciences Po: OxPo“. Sciences Po. Retrieved 2019-11-6.
  4. ^ “African Politics (4-vol. set)”. Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  5. ^ Morse, Yonatan L. (March 2021). “Authoritarian Africa: repression, resistance, and the power of ideas by Nic Cheeseman and Jonathan Fisher New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xxxii + 144”. The Journal of Modern African Studies. 59 (1): 126–128. doi:10.1017/S0022278X20000695. ISSN 0022-278X. S2CID 233863695.
  6. ^ “Editorial_Board”. Oxford Academic. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  7. ^ “Dr Nic Cheeseman appointed the founding Editor in Chief of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics”. www.politics.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 16 July 2021. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  8. ^ Goet, Niels. “50 events that shaped Kenya”. OxPol. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  9. ^ “Eight columnists quit Kenya media giant citing ‘meddling by gov’t and management’“. Africanews. 27 March 2018. Retrieved 16 July 2021.
  10. ^ “About DiA | Democracy in Africa”. Archived from the original on 2024-06-02. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  11. ^ “Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy, University of Birmingham”. Invest Africa. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  12. ^ “Kenya braces for high-stakes, high-risk presidential election”. Le Monde.fr. 2022-08-08. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  13. ^ “Letter: Ethiopia needs a new model to heal its ancient divisions”. Financial Times. 2021-12-23. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  14. ^ “How democracy looks different in Ghana”. Newsweek. 2016-12-10. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  15. ^ “Opinion | It’s time for international election monitors to start doing their job”. Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  16. ^ Walsh, Declan (2022-09-02). “In Kenyan Elections, the People Decide First. Then Come the Judges”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  17. ^ “Coups in Africa: Why they don’t spell the end of democracy”. BBC News. 2022-02-08. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  18. ^ “Episodes”. The Resistance Bureau. Retrieved 2023-08-24.
  19. ^ Africa, Democracy in (2020-07-02). “Introducing The Resistance Bureau! | Democracy in Africa”. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  20. ^ “The rise and fall of civil-authoritarianism in Africa : patronage, participation, and political parties in Kenya and Zambia”. 2007. OCLC 124073047.
  21. ^ “CAS Award | GIGA”. www.giga-hamburg.de. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  22. ^ “Books of the year – part one”. The Spectator. 2018-11-10. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  23. ^ “What We’re Reading in Summer 2018”. Center For Global Development. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  24. ^ “PSA Academic Prizes 2019 | The Political Studies Association (PSA)”. PSA Academic Prizes 2019 | The Political Studies Association (PSA). Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  25. ^ “Professor Nic Cheeseman”. University of Birmingham. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  26. ^ “Nic Cheeseman”. European Democracy Hub. Retrieved 2023-08-24.
  27. ^ Cheeseman, Nic; Lynch, Gabrielle; Willis, Justin (2021). The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-41723-5.
  28. ^ Cheeseman, Nic (2017-10-10). “Professor Nic Cheeseman joins OXFAM! | Democracy in Africa”. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  29. ^ “The Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics“. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  30. ^ “Authoritarian Africa”. https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/authoritarian-africa-9780190279653. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  31. ^ A Dictionary of African Politics. Oxford University Press. 24 January 2019. ISBN 978-0-19-182883-6.
  32. ^ “Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective“. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  33. ^ “Institutions and Democratization in Africa“. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  34. ^ “The African Affairs Reader“. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  35. ^ “African Politics: Major Works“. Routledge. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  36. ^ “How to Rig An Election“. Yale University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  37. ^ “Democracy in Africa“. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  38. ^ “Politics Meets Policies“. International IDEA. Retrieved 2019-11-06
  39. ^ “The Handbook of African Politics“. Routledge. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
  40. ^ “Our Turn to Eat“. Lit Verlag. Retrieved 2019-11-06.