Tuesday, April 12
Tea at 4:15 p.m.
Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Philips Wing, Magill Library

Since presidential term limits were adopted into many African countries’ constitutions in the early 1990s, more than thirty presidents have reached the end of their second terms in office. Of these, about half have quietly stepped down in compliance with the rules while the other half have attempted to manipulate constitutions to repeal term limits so they can run indefinitely. This leads to a puzzle: why are some African presidents meaningfully constrained by constitutional rules while others are able to easily defy these same laws? Drawing on field research in Uganda and Zambia, McKie will explore the cause of this variation and discuss the implications of my findings for countries where presidents are currently angling for a third term, such as Rwanda, DRC, and Sierra Leone.

Kristin McKie is an assistant professor of Government and African Studies at St. Lawrence University, a selective liberal arts college in upstate New York. For the current 2015-2016 academic year, she is a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University in 2012 and a B.A. in Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies from Haverford College in 2002. Prior to starting at St. Lawrence, she was a Postdoctoral Associate with the Yale Program on Democracy at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University from 2011-2012.  Dr. McKie’s research explores variations in the development of the rule of law across sub-Saharan Africa, especially relating to rules that constrain executive power. Recently she has been invited to speak on these topics at the U.S. State Department, the Brookings Institution and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and her research has been published in Social Research: An International Quarterly. Originally from Audubon, PA, she now resides in Canton, NY with her husband, Sean and her cat, Monkey.

Sponsored by the Libraries, the Political Science Department, and the Africana Studies Program.