Professor of Comparative Politics

Email: g.lynch@warwick.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)24765 23303
Room E1.26

Advice and Feedback Hours in term 1 of 2024-25: Monday 11.30-12.30 and Tuesday 15.30-16.30 during term time; out of term time meetings to be arranged by email.

More about Gabrielle's...

Publications

Gabrielle studied at the University of Oxford for a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, an MPhil in Politics, and a DPhil in Politics. She joined the department in 2011 after holding posts at Newcastle University, Keele University, and the University of Leeds.

Research interests

Prof. Gabrielle Lynch’s research interests lie in understanding the nature and political salience of ethnic identities, impact and utility of reconciliation and transitional justice mechanisms, elections and democratisation, impact of social media, and judiciaries.

Her research to date has focused on African politics. Between January 2011 and January 2013 she undertook a three-year project on ‘Truth and Justice: The search for peace and stability in modern Kenya’, which was funded through an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) first grant. Together with Nic Cheeseman (University of Birmingham) and Justin Willis (University of Durham), Gabrielle was then awarded two further ESRC grants – an ESRC Knowledge Exchange Grant (2013-2014) to work with the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office on contemporary Kenyan politics, and an ESRC Standard Grant (2012-2017) to conduct a comparative study on the impact of elections in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana. Gabrielle then conducted work funded by an Exeter GCRF Facilitator Grant, Warwick GCRF Accelerator Grant and FCDO grant with Elena Gadjanova (University of Exeter), Jason Reifler (University of Exeter) and Ghadafi Saibu (University of Bayreuth) on social media and political mobilisation in Ghana, Zambia and Kenya. Most recently she has conducted work on the role of judiciaries in elections funded by the Warwick Policy Support Fund, and established the African Judiciaries Research Network.

In 2019 awarded with the ESRC Award for Outstanding International Impact and the Market Research Society’s President’s Medal for extraordinary research with impact.

You can follow Gabrielle on twitter @GabrielleLynch6.

Positions

Gabrielle is the Warwick UCU Equalities Officer, an elected academic staff assembly member of the University Senate, and member of the Senate Working Group on Academic Freedom.

Outside of the University, Gabrielle is the Vice President/Research of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), and member of the Review of African Political Economy International Advisory Board and Democratization Board. She is formerly an elected member of council for the African Studies Association of the UK (ASA-UK), chair and editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and editor of the International Journal of Human Rights.

Gabrielle wrote a twice monthly column for the Saturday Nation (the Saturday edition of Kenya's leading national newspaper) from April 2014 to March 2018 when she stood down alongside 7 other independent columnists in protest at "the loss of editorial independence and media freedom" at the Nation Media Group. From November 2015 to January 2017 she also wrote a twice monthly column for The East African (the main regional newspaper).

Teaching and Supervision

Gabrielle is interested in supervising PhDs in a range of comparative and African politics fields.

Publications include

Cheeseman, N., G. Lynch & J. Willis (2020) The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cheeseman, N., K. Karuti & G. Lynch (eds) (2020) Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Lynch, G. & P. Von Doepp (eds) (2019) Routledge Handbook of Democratization in Africa. Abingdon: Routledge.

Lynch, G. (2018) Performances of Injustices: The politics of truth, justice and reconciliation in Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Crawford, G. & G. Lynch (eds) (2012) Democratization in Africa: Challenges and Prospects. Abingdon: Routledge

Lynch, G. (2011) I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

NB: For a full list see publications