Controlling Territory, Controlling Voters: The Electoral Geography of African Campaign Violence

Michael Wahman gives a talk about his book 'Controlling Territory, Controlling Voters: The Electoral Geography of African Campaign Violence' during this guest seminar.

In the book, Wahman focuses on the political geography of election violence in Africa, building on one important observation: elections in many African countries are highly regional and the support for political parties is rarely nationalized. Wahman argues that in such environments, campaign violence becomes an important tool used by parties to control and regulate access to space. Building on a wealth of data and extensive fieldwork in Zambia and Malawi, the author uses a combination of electoral geography analysis, constituency-level election violence data collected from local election monitors, focus group interviews, archival material, and individual-level survey data to show how campaign violence in both countries is used as a territorial tool, predominantly within party strongholds.

Michael Wahman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. His work focuses on elections and representation in Africa and has appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Politics. He is the author of Controlling Territory, Controlling Voters (Oxford University Press, 2023) and is also the guest editor of a forthcoming special issue (in Public Opinion Quarterly) on Trust in Elections.

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