A Madison resident and an important part of the Political Science Department at the UW-Madison for many years, Scott Straus was recommended by many to talk about the current situation in Africa – with the understanding that it would be impossible to cover the entire continent in one show.

Professor Scott Straus is now a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. He’s also the 2023 Mahatma M.K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and has been honored with many professional awards for his scholarship.

Straus studies political violence, genocide, human rights and post-conflict politics with an empirical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and is the author or editor of nine books, including Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa and The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War. His articles also appear in a number of national and international journals.

Prior to his academic career, Scott Straus was a freelance journalist based in Nairobi; he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 coverage of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Scott Straus at UC Berkeley http://polisci.berkeley.edu/people/person/scott-straus

Map courtesy of The Library of Congress