Anderson David

Prof David Anderson

Email:: david.anderson@africa.ox.ac.uk
Telephone:: 01865 613903
Fax:: 01865 613906

Position:

Professor African Politics

Title:

Professor

College:

St Cross College

Office Details:

African Studies Centre, 13 Bevington Road

Introduction:

David Anderson is Professor of African Politics and a Fellow of St Cross College.

Research Activities and Interests:

Professor Anderson’s long-standing interest in the history and politics of eastern Africa is reflected in a range of current research projects:

• After the publication of a monograph in May 2007, The Khat Controversy, he has more recently completed a study of the social harms associated with khat consumption for the Home Office. This study, co-authored with Dr Neil Carrier, also looked at the legal status of khat across a number of countries.
• Anderson continues to research and write on the theme of state violence and its consequences, and is currently completing a book examining the history of political violence in Kenya, incorporating the story of the current ICC prosecutions of leading Kenyan politicians.
• A longer-term study of the Cold War in Africa is now building toward the completion of a monograph, to be published by Faber & Faber during 2012.
• Along with Dr David Turton, Dr Marco Bassi, and Dr Graciela Gil-Romera, Anderson is now working on a number of publications from the AHRC-funded project on the Lower Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia.
• His work in connection with the High Court case brought against the British government by four Mau Mau veterans will result in the publication of a short monograph in 2012, focusing on the subject of torture and abuse under British rule in Kenya.
• A number of essays on the history of crime in eastern Africa have been published in recent years, and these are now being revised and brought together with some new essays in a monograph co-authored with Professor Richard Waller of Bucknell University, Pennsylvania (a former Visiting Fellow at the African Studies Centre).
• Anderson is working with Dr Neil Carrier, on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to construct a political ethnography of the Eastleigh region of Nairobi, ‘Little Mogadiscio’ as it is known because of the predominance of Somali businesses in the area.

Teaching Responsibilities:

David Anderson takes a leading role in the teaching of the Core Course on ‘Themes in History and the Social Sciences in Africa’, and offers an Optional Paper on ‘Violence and Historical Memory in Eastern Africa’. This Optional Paper, which in 2012 will be taught in collaboration with George Karekwaivanane (MSc 2010), is also popular with students from the MPhil and MSc degrees in Development Studies, Politics and Modern History. He also supervises MSc students writing dissertation on eastern Africa. Professor Anderson is a very active supervisor of doctoral students, mostly drawn from the disciplines of Politics and History. Over the past five years his students have undertaken research in a wide range of African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan, DRC, Ethiopia, Zambia, Malawi, Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Media Expertise:

Professor Anderson regularly contributes commentary on African affairs to the print and broadcast media, and has recently appeared on BBC News, BBC World Television News, Al Jazeera, ITN, and Sky News, amongst others. Amongst his recently published print media pieces are:

• ‘Yemen: stumbling into civil war’, Ciajing (Beijing, China), 1 October 2011 (in Mandarin)
• ‘The fight for Libya’s oil’, Global Times (Hong Kong, China), 13 September 2011, p14
• ‘Somalia’s famine’, Metro, 13 September 2011, pp.16-17
• ‘Egypt’s slow coup: Mubarak caged and a nation on trial’, Ciajing (Beijing, China), 15 August 2011(in Mandarin), pp34-36
• ‘Comment & Debate: It’s not just Kenya’, The Guardian, 26 July 2011, p27
• ‘Comment: Mau Mau in the High Court’, The Times, 22 July 2011, p5
• ‘Britain’s dark secrets in Kenya’, The Times, 7 April 2011, p13.

Publications:

David Anderson’s most recent book, The Khat Controversy, examines the global expansion of eastern Africa’s khat economy, featuring new research on the production, distribution chains, and consumption of this unusual commodity. The study is critical of the US prohibition of khat, and has generated much discussion of the political and commercial aspects of commodity control. The study also has much to say about the impact of prohibition upon market behaviour.

Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, published is 2005, is the first full history of the Mau Mau rebellion and its brutal suppression in 1950s Kenya. Widely reviewed around the world, the book has contributed to a wider debate on the character of British imperial rule in the twentieth century, as well as stirring up a great deal of controversy within Kenya. Anderson continues to write on matters connected with this study, as well as presenting his findings through other media.

Professor Anderson was the founder and Executive Editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, from 2007 to 2011. The journal is published four times each year by Routledge.

Other recent academic publications (since 2009) include:

• ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘lost’ British empire archives: colonial conspiracy, or bureaucratic bungle?’ Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 40, i (2012): 1-16

• ‘Camel milk, capital and gender: the changing dynamics of pastoralist dairy markets in Kenya’, (with Hannah Elliott, Hassan Hussein Kochore & Emma Lochery), in E. Emery & G. Clarence-Smith (eds) Camel Cultures: in press.

• ‘The instrumentalization of confusion: the politics of belonging and violence on Mount Elgon, Kenya’, (with Gabrielle Lynch), in J. Bertrand & O. Haklai (eds) Nationalism and Ethnic Conflicts (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2011): in press.

• ‘Clan identity and Islamic identity in Somalia’, Defence R&D Canada - Toronto Contract Report, 2011-080 (Royal Military College of Canada: Kingston Ontario, 2011): in press.

• ‘Policing and communal conflict: the Cyprus Emergency, 1954-60’ in Georgina Sinclair (ed), Globalising British Policing (‘The History of Policing Series’, London: Ashgate, 2011)

• ‘The politics of oil in eastern Africa’ (with Adrian Browne), Journal of Eastern African Studies 5.ii (2011): 369-412

• ‘Punishment, race and ‘the raw native’: settler society and Kenya’s flogging scandals, 1895-1930’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37, iii (2011): 479-98

• ‘Khat in the UK: social harms and legislation’ (with Neil Carrier), Home Office Research Report (July 2011): 39pp.

• ‘Sexual threat and settler society: black perils in Kenya, c.1907-1930’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 38, i (2010): 47-74

• ‘The new piracy: the local context’, Survival 52 i (2010): 44-50

• ‘Majimboism: the troubled history of an idea’, in Daniel Branch, Nic Cheeseman & Leigh Gardner (eds), Our Turn to Eat! Politics in Kenya since 1950 (Lit Verlag: Berlin, 2010): 17-43

• ‘The Kenyan cattle trade and the economics of empire, 1914-1948’, in Karen Brown & Dan Gilfoyle (eds), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Ohio UP: Athens OH, 2010): 250-68

• ‘Somali piracy: historical context, political contingency’, Working Paper 34, Centre for European Policy Studies (December 2009): 14pp.

• ‘Khat in colonial Kenya: a history of prohibition and control’ (with Neil Carrier), Journal of African History 50 iii (2009): 377-98

Full Publications Listing