Nic Cheeseman (@fromagehomme) is Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham. Formerly the Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University, he is the Founding Director of Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR). He mainly works on democracy, elections and development and has conducted in-country research in a range of African countries including Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, but has also published on Latin America and post-communist Europe. He is currently working on two projects: one looks at how to understand and support democratic resilience in an era of autocratization, and the other is to produce a history of African political thought.
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 Democracy in Africa (2015), Institutions and Democracy in Africa (2017), How to Rig an Election (2018) – selected as one of the books of the year by the Spectator magazine – and Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective (2018), Authoritarian Africa (2020), The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa (2020) and the Handbook of Kenyan Politics (2020). In addition, he is the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and was an advisor to, and writer for, the African Progress Panel set up by Kofi Annan.
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 of African and global events, Professor Cheeseman has appeared on CNN's flagship global affairs show One World, while his analysis has featured in the Economist, Le Monde, Financial Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, and the Daily Nation, as well as his regular columns for the Mail & Guardian and The Africa Report. In total, his articles have been read over two million times. Many of his interviews and insights can be found on the website that he founded and co-edits, www.democracyinafrica.org. Most recently, Professor Cheeseman was part of the team that launched the Resistance Bureau, a new webinar and discussion space that brings together speakers from across Africa to discuss how democracy and freedom can best be strengthened and defended. Check out This is the Resistence Bureau for more details and past episodes.