Speaker: Catherine Boone
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
Talk Description
Professor Boone will talk about her book titled, Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design and how it integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments.
Speaker’s Bio
Catherine Boone is Harold Laski Professor of Political Science and Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a political scientist interested in patterns regionalism and political-economic development issues in Africa in a comparative perspective. Her work is or has been funded by the UK Research Council ESRC, LSE International Inequalities Institute, LSE STICERD, the SSRC, Fulbright, the World Bank, Harvard Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (ACLS). She is an elected Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. In 2024 she was awarded the “Distinguished Africanist Award” (for impact on the study of African politics) by the African Politics Conference Group, an organized section of the American Political Science Association and the African Studies Association.
Professor Boone is the author of four books, including Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which focuses on the causes and effects of spatial (geographic) inequalities within African countries. This book was recognized by an Honorable Mention for the ASA-APSA African Political Conference Group Best Book Award in 2025. (Download cv [click below] for list of reviews.) She is also author of Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), winner of APSA’s 2016 Luebbert Book Award for best book in Comparative Politics. In 2025-2026, she is conducting research in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire on a new project on partisan politics and the governance of commodity chains in export agriculture (coffee and cocoa), and continuing the Côte d’Ivoire land titling research in collaboration with Dr. Matt Ribar.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, UW-Madison.
The event is free and open to the public.