A large conventional wisdom has maintained that economic downturns, which drastically reduce grain prices and the returns to agricultural labor, foment peasant resistance against landowners and state officials. Yet, recent waves of peasant resistance in the developing world have occurred in a prosperous time of extraordinarily high prices. We reconcile these findings by theorizing about the spatial dimensions of peasant unrest.

There is growing concern about the movement of individuals from private sectors to bureaucracies, yet little attention is paid to how this affects interest groups’ activities. Interest groups with connections to bureaucrats may exert less effort to provide information to policymakers (the “substitution effect”) or exert more effort (the “complement effect”). We address this question by constructing a novel dataset on career trajectories of bureaucrats in the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) and firms that served on USTR advisory committees during the period 1997-2017.

The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.

There is growing evidence that Russia’s state security and intelligence agencies are increasingly active beyond its borders. The FSB, GRU, and SVR are all used to support the Kremlin’s broader geopolitical objectives. As well as being used for ‘wet work’ (or assassinations), these agencies are engaged in all manner of activities associated with active measures -- the subversive, political warfare originally employed by the KGB during the Cold War.

Zimbabwe's catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008–9 saw an unprecedented number of people affected, with 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Cholera, however, was much more than a public health crisis: it represented the nadir of the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008. This study focuses on the political life of the cholera epidemic, tracing the historical origins of the outbreak, examining the social pattern of its unfolding and impact, analysing the institutional and communal responses to the disease, and marking the effects of its aftermath.

Ethnic identities around the world are deeply linked to the modern territorial state, yet it is often unclear to what extent ethnicity shapes states or states shape ethnic identities. I argue that governments at the national and subnational level have incentives to bias governance in favor of the largest ethnic groups in their territory. The resulting disadvantages for ethnic minorities can motivate minority assimilation and emigration. Both reactions gradually align ethnic with administrative boundaries. I examine this process at the subnational level in 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.