selischer@ufl.edu

Sebastian Elischer’s work analyzes the interplay between identities and institutions. He is particularly interested in how identities shape and affect democratization and other political dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. In his first book Sebastian Elischer examined the salience of ethnic identities at the aggregate level of political parties in sub-Saharan Africa. His subsequent monograph Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. It argues that the conventional conception of African parties as ethnic parties is wrong. Instead the African political landscape is considerably more diverse. Whereas ethnic parties dominate in some countries, non-ethnic parties have become the norm in others. Elischer finds a correlation between a country’s ethnic make-up and the salience of political ethnicity: countries with a core ethnic group are prone to form non-ethnic parties. In countries lacking a core ethnic group, ethnic parties constitute the norm. The book attracted reviews by Foreign Affairs, Party Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Modern African Studies and African Studies Quarterly. His work on African parties also led to the publication of articles in Africa Spectrum and Democratization and a number of chapters in edited volumes. He received generous support from the Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Related work has appeared in the Review of African Political Economy and Comparative Governance and Politics. His second book Salafism and Political Order in Africa examines the effect of informal religious regulation on violent Islamic extremism in areas of weak statehood.It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. In it Elischer provides a comparative analysis of how different West and East African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. In doing so, he establishes a causal link between state-imposed organizational gatekeepers in the Islamic sphere and the absence of homegrown jihadi Salafism. Foreifn Affairs rated the book as one of the best books in 2022. The book attracted favorable reviews from Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Strategic Analysis, and African Studies Quarterly. A potcast with Elischer about his 2021 book can be accessed here. Elischer has published his findings from this project in African Affairs, Comparative Politics, and The Journal of the Middle East and Africa. For this project he received generous support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the UF Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, a research grant from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and the American Political Science Association. Elischer is currently one of the editors of the African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the African Studies Association. In the 2021-2022 academic year, Elischer was a research fellow at the Kellogg Institute of International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. There, he conducted research on post-1990 military coup outcomes. He regularly contributes to public debates on Africa. His most recent commentaries appeared in The Conversation, Foreign Affairs and the Monkey Cage. Between 2015 and 2017 he serves as co-editor of the Africa Yearbook. He has also provided extensive advice to the German foreign ministry and the German ministry for economic cooperation.

Kenya, Niger, West, Government/Governance, Religion, Democracy, Academia/Universities, Youth