Rebecca Tapscott

Rebecca holds a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School, where she also completed her MA on international development and development economics. She has both worked in international development and conducted evaluations of development programming across an array of topics ranging from micro-health insurance to adult literacy, in Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger, and Senegal. More recently, her work has focused on local security and state capacity in Uganda. Rebecca is especially interested in the politics of development, and uncovering dynamics that help explain why development interventions so often “fail”.

She has published in a variety of development and area studies journals, including on dynamics of local security in Uganda in Development and Change and African Affairs, gender and militarized masculinity in International Affairs and Disasters, and vigilantism and the state’s monopoly on violence in Perspectives on Politics. She is the author of Arbitrary States: Social control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda (Oxford, 2021). Rebecca is an editorial member of International Studies Review and review’s editor for Civil Wars.

Rebecca is currently running two projects: (1) on the history of local government in Uganda; and (2) the politics of research ethics and their regulation.