Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.  He is also the Director of the Institute of African Studies at SIPA.

Mahmood Mamdani's reputation as an expert in African history, politics and international relations has made him an important voice in contemporary debates about the changing role of Africa in a global context.  His book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 1996) has been hailed as one of the best scholarly works on Africa published in English, and won the prestigious Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association of the USA (1998).  Other books include When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002), Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative Essays on the Politics of Rights and Culture (editor, Palgrave Macmillan, November 2000), Crises and Reconstruction - African Perspectives: Two Lectures (with Colin Leys, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, December 1998), Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (Africa World Press Inc., 1983), and many others.

Recent works include "Iraq: Collective Punishment in War and Peace," in Irwin Abrams and Wang Gungwu, eds., The Iraq War and Its Consequences: Thoughts of Nobel Peace Laureates and Eminent Scholars (World Scienti.c, 2004); and When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002). He is also author of the Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004).

Professor Mamdani holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh (1967).  He received an MA and MALD from Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1969, and in 1974 he received his PhD from Harvard University.  His other academic appointments include A.C. Jordan Professor of African Studies and Director for the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).  He has taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and Makerere University (Uganda). 

He is the founding Director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda, and is the current President (1999-2002) of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Africa's social science body based in Senegal.  Mr. Mamdani's current work focuses on internal conflict and civil war in Africa, with particular attention given to the political and social restructuring which such conflict elicits.