Luke Melchiorre

Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Ciencia Política, Faculty Member

University of Toronto, Political Science, PhD Candidate

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I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and the Book Reviews Editor of the academic journal, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.

Drawing on field work in three East African countries over the last decade, my interdisciplinary research program aims to reconceptualize core concepts in comparative politics science, particularly as they relate to democracy and development. My research also asserts the agency of actors in the Global South through a historical analysis of imperialism, non-alignment, and south-south cooperation during the Cold War. In advancing this research agenda, I aim to push back against scholarly approaches to the study of the Global South that measure the success or failure of these societies based on the degree to which they replicate Western models.

I am currently completing two book projects that examine decolonization and democracy from the perspective of African university students. Under contract with James Currey, Comrade Power! Student Politics and the Kenyan State charts the historical rise and fall of the militant Kenyan student movement. Based on archival research and over 100 semi-structured interviews conducted over the last decade, I argue that Kenyan universities under the regime of Daniel arap Moi were crucial venues for the political development of the Kenyan state: where the country’s elite was formed, where contentious tactics of resistance were developed, and where state strategies for managing such contentious politics were honed. A second manuscript, studying the global importance of student activism throughout the African continent, provisionally titled, African Student Movements and the Politics of Decolonization, is under contract with Hurst and Oxford University Press for their African Arguments series.

My research interests include the political economy of development and a critical and comparative assessment of democracy and its discontents in the Global South, with a particular regional focus on African politics.

In 2018, I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

TEACHING FIELDS
Comparative Politics; International Development; International Politics; African Studies

RESEARCH TOPICS
Political Economy of Development; Democracy; International Politics; African Politics; Populism

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Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

Muqtedar Khan

University of Delaware

Josiah Heyman

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

Andreas Umland

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Jeff Corntassel

University of Victoria

Benjamin Isakhan

Deakin University

Oludamini Ogunnaike

University of Virginia

Richard Bellamy

University College London

Kefa Otiso

Bowling Green State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

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Papers by Luke Melchiorre

Generational Populism and the Political Rise of Robert Kyagulanyi -- aka Bobi Wine -- in Uganda

Review of African Political Economy, 2023

This article analyses the political rise of the Ugandan opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka... more This article analyses the political rise of the Ugandan opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, arguing that he has a deployed a novel type of generational populism – a mobilising political discourse which frames the struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ in generational terms, defining the former in relation to their status as youth, and in antagonistic opposition to an elite, which is depicted as defending a gerontocratic political order. At a theoretical level, the article broadens political science’s conception of populism, by introducing a new subtype of the political phenomenon which demonstrates the importance of intergenerational dynamics in the construction of the discursive categories of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. While it argues that Kyagulanyi’s success demonstrates the potential of populism in African countries to electorally challenge incumbent regimes, by helping to build political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, incorporating previously excluded social groups into the political process, it concludes by stressing that Kyagulanyi’s political project has failed to offer any real ideological alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has characterised President Museveni’s Uganda over the last four decades.

The Vietnam War in Africa

The Vietnam War in Africa, 2022

This chapter explores the transnational history of the Vietnam War in Africa. It argues that, whi... more This chapter explores the transnational history of the Vietnam War in Africa. It argues that, while the conflict in Southeast Asia did not influence politics and societies on the continent in the same ways that it did in much of the West, the war was significant in many African countries and particularly in contexts where politics was imagined in internationalist terms. As such, it has an important history in states that aspired to lead non-aligned worldmaking projects and in southern African societies engaged in struggles over White-minority rule. The chapter, therefore, decentres anti-war protests within the historiography on the Vietnam War to one of four sets of transnational relationships that connected African societies to the war. These relationships include (a) military interactions between the North Vietnamese and African liberation movements, (b) the role that non-aligned African state leaders played in trying to broker peace in Southeast Asia, (c) the history of African anti-war protests in solidarity with the NLF and the North Vietnamese and (d) the solidarities forged between white conservatives in the US and Southern Africa, who imagined the war in Vietnam and the repression of African nationalism as two fronts in a global struggle against communism. In examining these relationships, this chapter both offers a historiographical challenge of the idea that the Vietnam War is a mere footnote in African history and it also opens a vista from which the historiography of the Vietnam War on the continent might be meaningfully developed.

Luke Melchiorre

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