Post: Andrew Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in Comparative Government

Appointed: 2007

College: St Peters College

Phone No: +44 7963880989 -  Contact electronically

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Introduction:

Philip Roessler is the Andrew Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in Comparative Government, Research Fellow in Politics at St. Peter's College, and a research associate with the African Studies Center at the University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. Before his present post, he held fellowships from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Since 2005 he has made frequent trips to Sudan and neighboring countries to conduct field research on the causes of the civil war in Darfur.

Research Activities and Interests:

Dr. Roessler's research focuses on civil war; coups d'etat; power sharing; ethnic politics; electoral authoritarianism; and African politics.  

Currently he is writing a book manuscript and various articles on the trade-off African rulers face between coup risk and civil war risk.  He is testing his argument cross-nationally across most countries in sub-Saharan Africa (from independence to 2005) and with in-depth case studies of the onset of civil war in Darfur in 2003 and the August 1998 war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The project has received funding from the John Fell OUP Fund and the National Science Foundation.

He is also collaborating with Marc Morjé Howard of Georgetown University on an ongoing research project on elections and change in post-cold war political regimes. Their first article, published in the American Journal of Political Science, studied the causes of liberalizing electoral outcomes in competitive authoritarian regimes. Their second paper to be published in Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition, edited by Staffan I. Lindberg, analyzes temporal and spatial changes across all regime types between 1987 and 2006. Currently, they are analyzing the causes of electoral contestation in authoritarian regimes.

Research News

• Jun 2008, Philip Roessler awarded John Fell OUP Research Grant, Read more

Publications:

Working Papers

 "Ethnic Power Sharing, Coups and Civil War," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto, Canada, September 3-6, 2009.

"Internal Rivalry, Threat Substitution and Civil War:  Darfur as a Theory Building Case," University of Oxford, 2009.

 

Journal Articles

“Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes” (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard), in the American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2006), pp. 365-381.

"Donor-Induced Democratization and the Privatization of State Violence in Kenya and Rwanda," Comparative Politics, 37(2), 2005, pp. 207-227.

 

Book Chapters

"Post-Cold War Political Regimes:  When Do Elections Matter?" (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard) in Staffan I. Lindberg, ed., Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

"Democratic Republic of the Congo," (with John Prendergast) in William Durch, ed., Twenty-First-Century Peace Operations (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2006).