Dr Adam Branch

Adam Branch is University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Centre of African Studies. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University and his BA from Harvard University. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda. He is the author of two books: Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Zed Books, 2015, co-authored with Zachariah Mampilly) andDisplacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (Oxford University Press, 2011). 

Adam's research has focused on African politics, in particular on questions of political violence, foreign intervention, and popular resistance, largely in East Africa. His first book, Displacing Human Rights, was a critique of human rights intervention’s tendency to exacerbate violence and undermine democracy, based upon two years of research on war and displacement in northern Uganda. His second book, Africa Uprising, turned to the politics of unarmed popular protest and argued that a “third wave” of large-scale urban uprisings is erupting throughout Africa today, which could prove the driver of future political transformation.

At present, Adam is working around two research agendas. First, he is the PI on an AHRC-funded project on the political ecology of post-war reconstruction and development in northern Uganda. The research explores the environmental violence of the “post-conflict” period, in particular land grabbing and natural resource extraction. It also looks into how the expanding regime of climate change adaptation interventions are reshaping people’s political and economic lives. The project will inquire into the connections between “green development” and continued militarization and dispossession in an area still dealing with the legacies of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Second, Adam is continuing his research on international criminal law in Africa. He has written most recently on the trial of Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court, the so-called African Criminal Court, and the politics of complementarity. He is interested in the possibilities for international criminal law to be part of broadly emancipatory political agendas, as well as the implications of global climate change for the forms of violence addressed by global justice.

Finally, he is interested in the politics of knowledge production and the decolonization of the university, building on his work in helping to establish an interdisciplinary PhD programme in Social Studies at Makerere.