Lise Rakner Editor

Leonardo R. Arriola is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Associate Dean of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for African Studies. His research focuses on representation and governance in multiethnic societies. He has published on topics such as inter-ethnic political cooperation, party competition under ethnic polarization, and political violence in divided societies. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. He is co-editor of Women and Power in Africa (OUP, 2021). Lise Rakner is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bergen. Her research interests cover the fields of democratization and autocratization, with particular emphasis on human rights, electoral politics, political parties, and processes of democratic backsliding. She holds an adjunct position at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), Bergen, and is the PI of two major projects: Breaking BAD: Understanding Backlash Against Democracy in Africa (funded by the Research Council of Norway) and Autocratization Dynamics: Innovations in Research-Embedded Learning. Nicolas van de Walle is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He has published widely on democratization issues and electoral politics, as well as on the politics of economic reform and foreign aid, with a special focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. His most recent book is Electoral Politics in Africa since 1990: Change in Continuity, co-authored with Jaimie Bleck (CUP, 2018).