Alumnus Christopher Clapham (PPE Keble, 1960) awarded an OBE in the 2025 Birthday Honours

“The value of the Oxford experience lay in the variety of ideas and issues to which we were exposed, and the intelligence of so many of the people – both within and beyond the formal teaching process – with whom we shared them.”

Christopher Clapham, (PPE Keble, 1960), has been awarded an OBE in the 2025 Birthday Honours, for “services to academia, foreign policy, and UK relations with the Horn of Africa”

As part of our message of congratulations, we recognise Christopher’s outstanding achievements and asked him for his personal reflections on a full political and academic career:

To be awarded an OBE sixty-five years after matriculating from Keble in 1960 must count as some kind of a record, but its origins lie in the Oxford of the early 1960s, when I helped to organise and participated in an expedition to study birds in the Red Sea.  The inspiration for this lay in the encouragement of Reg Moreau at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, doyen of African ornithologists, who alerted me that no one had looked at the bird populations of the Dahlac Islands since the 1850s, so our little band made its way to Ethiopia overland, and was taken out to the islands on patrol boats of what was then the Imperial Ethiopian Navy.  My first academic publication, “The Birds of the Dahlac Archipelago”, subsequently appeared in Ibis: The Journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union, in 1964.

My tutor, Basil Mitchell in Keble, warned me that spending the long vacation between my second and third years chasing round Africa watching birds would jeopardise my chances of gaining a First, and so indeed it did.  However, I gained something that turned out to be far more valuable, which was a lifetime fascination with Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, and in my eagerness to get back there I put in for a DPhil on Ethiopian government.  Dame Margery Perham, whose 1948 book The Government of Ethiopia was the only existing work on the subject, had already retired but kindly agreed to take me on as her final DPhil student, while in Addis Ababa I was looked after by Richard Pankhurst (son of Sylvia and grandson of Emmeline), who was Director of the university’s Institute of Ethiopian Studies.

The early 1960s saw an explosion in the study of African politics, on the back of the nationalist movements agitating for (and rapidly attaining) independence from colonial rule, but while the great majority of my contemporaries were examining these movements in one former colony of another, I found myself looking at the sole indigenous African state that had avoided colonial rule.  This plunged me into a very different agenda from colonial rule and anti-colonial nationalism, and took me instead into the study of the country’s peculiar and contested history, and the distinctive form of ‘imperialism’ that derived not only from the fact that it was ruled by an emperor, but also from a thoroughly autocratic system of government built on deep inequalities both between different ethnicities and within a highly personalised ruling structure.  In the process, I came to see the study of ‘politics’ not as the search for general principles applicable across all societies, but as something that derived from the distinctive origins and experiences of particular peoples.  Equally, while Western students of anti-colonial nationalism found themselves looking at territories for whose problems their own societies and governments bore a heavy load of historical responsibility, and almost invariably sided with the nationalists, Ethiopia marched to its own drum and imposed a level of detachment on those foreigners who sought to understand it.  ‘Insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ each have their own contributions to make to the study of political systems, in Africa and elsewhere, and my path has always been among the outsiders, with a consequent reluctance to become personally engaged in the, often, bitter conflicts and controversies of the societies with which I was concerned.

However, no one could build a career on knowing a lot about one African state and nothing at all about any other, so I took advantage of a post-doctoral fellowship at Manchester to try to learn something about other parts of Africa, and eventually settled on two small West African states, Liberia and Sierra Leone, for more intensive study.  After the outbreak of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, and the new regime’s close alliance with the Soviet Union, it became impossible in any event for Western academics to work in the country on a subject as sensitive as politics.  It was only once I discovered that one of my own former students, from when I taught at the university in Addis Ababa after completing my DPhil, had now become Minister of Education in the revolutionary regime, that I was able to mobilise the contacts needed to get back to Ethiopia and do the research for a book on the revolutionary government.  Once that government had in turn been overthrown, it became easier for me to visit Ethiopia on a fairly regular basis.

I could not honestly claim to have expected my research to have an impact of any kind.  I simply did it because I was interested in it, and extended my interests to meet the demands of teaching African politics at Lancaster University, where I spent by far the greatest part of my career.  It was only when I discovered that my work attracted a huge amount of interest from Ethiopians, who had very little access to the dispassionate analysis of their own country’s politics, that I came to appreciate that I had become an actor in the developments that I was examining.  The same goes for my attempts to explain this extremely peculiar corner of Africa to those who have been drawn there by their own concerns, ranging from diplomats to organisations seeking to alleviate the effects of famine or civil war, and which – to judge from the citation – largely accounts for the award of my OBE.  One problem facing well-meaning outsiders who become engaged in crises of one kind or another is that they are generally drawn by the crisis itself, and have only the sketchiest idea of the invariably longstanding problems that lay behind it.  Even diplomats generally serve terms of three or four years in any given post, and are then moved elsewhere.  I have known UK ambassadors to Ethiopia who had never previously served anywhere in Africa, or in one case even had a diplomatic posting of any kind, and I can only hope that I have been able to fill in some of the resulting gaps.  Even so, the reference in the citation to services to (presumably UK) foreign policy came as a complete surprise to me.

Looking back on my experience of reading PPE over sixty years ago, there was very little in the courses that I studied that was directly useful to my subsequent career.  The ‘politics’ that we were taught in the early 1960s was entirely concerned with the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States, and had no place for Africa or for anywhere beyond the Western democracies.  I had to start from scratch when I embarked on the DPhil.  The value of the Oxford experience lay in the variety of ideas and issues to which we were exposed, and the intelligence of so many of the people – both within and beyond the formal teaching process – with whom we shared them.  I only hope that this continues to be the case.

Christopher Clapham graduated from Keble in PPE in 1963 and gained a DPhil in 1966.  He served in the Politics Department of Lancaster University from 1971 to 2002, rising to the rank of Professor, and since his retirement has been attached to the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge.  He was President of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (1992-94), and Editor of The Journal of Modern African Studies (1997-2012).  His books include Haile-Selassie’s Government (1969), Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia (1988), Africa and the International System (1996), and The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay (2017).