Ken Opalo

Biography

Dr. Ken Opalo is an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research fellow in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University, and a senior fellow at New America.

His research interests include the political economy of development, climate politics, legislative institutions in Africa, the politics of state building, and the politics of education policy. Ken’s first book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores the cross-sectional and longitudinal variation in legislative institutionalization and strength in African states. He is currently working on two books titled Making Politics Work for Development in Africa and Educating Loyal Citizens and Workers: The Political Economy of Education Policy in Tanzania Since 1961. Ken has published papers in the British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Legislative Studies, World Development, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, the Journal of Historical Political Economy, among others.

Ken is a regular columnist for Kenya’s Standard Newspaper, occasionally contributes to Bloomberg Opinion, and has published in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. Ken also blogs on Substack (An Africanist Perspective) at https://www.africanistperspective.com/