UMass Boston

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Rita Kiki Edozie

Department:
Conflict Resolution, Human Security & Governance
Title:
Professor
Deval Patrick Endowed Chair
Location:
McCormack Hall Floor 03
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Biography

Rita Kiki Edozie is currently the Deval Patrick Endowed Chair of Political, Economic, and Social Innovation and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. From 2017-2023, Kiki served as the university’s interim Dean and associate dean of the John W McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies until the school was merged into the College of Liberal Arts.

Area of Expertise

African affairs and politics, global development, comparative democratization, international relations, international political economy, race and identity

Degrees

PhD, Politics, The New School for Social Research, NY

MA, Politics, The New School for Social Research, NY

MA, Communication Arts, Brooklyn College, CUNY, NY

BA, English and Dramatic Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife (Nigeria)

Professional Publications & Contributions

Books

Journal Articles

  • “Promoting Owned and Operated Development: Reflections of the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad)” African and Asian Studies, Volume 3, no.2. (2004)
  • “Third World Democracies: South-South Learning from Each Other” in Exploring Conflicts and Conflict Resolution in the Contemporary Third World Third World Studies Peer-Reviewed Proceedings Harold Isaacs (Association of Third World Studies, Inc. 2005)
  • “Emerging Studies in (Southern) African Politics: A Review Essay” in Journal of Asian and African Studies (Volume 42 (3/4): 353-358, 2007)
  • “New Trends in Democracy and Development: Democratic Capitalism in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya” in Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, (Volume 35 Issue 1: 2008)
  • “Cooperating Against Small State Marginalization: A Post Colonial Perspective on UNSC 1529 in Haiti 2004” Dubois Review of Social Science Research on Race (Volume 5, Spring, 2008)
  • “Global Citizens and Sudanese Subjects: Reading Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors” African Affairs (Volume 108, No 433, 2009)
  • “Socially Constructing Democracy and Peace: Nigeria’s National Dialogue on the Niger Delta Conflict” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development (Volume 6, Number 2, 2011)
  • “The Sixth Zone: the African Diaspora and the African Union (AU)’s Global Era Pan Africanism” Journal of African American Studies (Volume 16, Number 2, Pages 268-299, 2012)
  • “The Emerging Black Studies Africanist: A Case Study of MSU’s Triple Heritage AAAS PhD Program” in Journal of Pan African Studies (Volume 5, No. 4, October 2012)
  • “Africans Perspectives on Race in the U.S: Reading Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah” Africana Studies: A Review of Social Science Research (Volume 6, Spring, 2015)
  • “Pan African Security and Pax Africana: Navigating Global Hierarchies” in African Conflict and Peace-building Review, (Vol 4, No.2, Fall 2014, pp 38-59)
  • “African Americans in Greater Boston: Challenges, Identities, Legacies, and Movements” with Barbara Lewis in Changing Faces of Greater Boston (A Report from Boston Indicators, the Boston Foundation, UMass Boston and the UMass Donahue Institute, April 2019)
  • “Changing Demographics and Policy Reflections: The Case for Historic and Foreign Blacks in Greater Boston” with Barbara Lewis in Elsie Scott’s Africa-America 2021: Re-Envisioning Liberation for the Global Black Diaspora, Journal of the Center for Policy Analysis and Research, (Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, March 2021)

Book Chapters

  • “Sudan’s Identity Wars and Democratic Route to Peace” in Perspectives on Contemporary Ethnic Conflict: Primal Violence the Politics of Conviction, Santosh Saha (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006)
  • “Centralization in Nigeria’s PDP: Addressing Pluralism in Africa’s Democracies” in Santosh Saha eds. The Politics of Ethnicity and National Identity (Peter Lang, 2007)
  • “Democratization in Multi-religious Contexts in Africa: Amina vs the (Dis-United) States of Nigeria” in Kamari Clarke’s Local Institutions, Global Controversies: Islam in Sub Saharan African Contexts, MacMillan Working Paper Series, (Yale University-CT, 2007)
  • “Rwanda-Burundi’s ‘National-Ethnic’ Dilemma: Democracy, Deep Divisions and Conflict Re-represented” in Santosh Saha eds. Ethnicity and Socio-political Change in Africa and Other Developing Countries: A Constructive Discourse in State Building (Lexington Books, 2008)
  • “Nigeria’s 2007 Election in Comparative Perspective: Democratic Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy in Africa” in Victor Okafor eds. Nigeria’s Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for the Democratic Movement in Africa (Praeger, 2008)
  • “Beauty Troubles: Gender and Difference in Nigeria’s Developing Democracy” in Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley eds. Women of the World: Volume II, (ABC-CLIO 2009)
  • “New Encounters in US-Africa Democracy Relations” in Jack Mangala eds. Africa in Contemporary International Relations (Palgrave, 2010)
  • “African Solutions for (Malian) Problems: Pan Africanist vs. Pan-Sahelian Global Play in Contemporary Africa” in The Sahel: Focus of Hope, Focus of Fear in Marcel Kissitou and Pauline Ginsberg (Adonis &Abbey, 2014)
  • “Rethinking US-Africa Democracy Relations in Obama’s First Term” in Cassandra Rachel Veney, US-Africa Relations: From Clinton to Obama. (Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield), 2014
  • “Pan Africanism is Africa’s Third Way” in Toyin Falola and Samuel Oloruntuba eds. Handbook on African Politics, Palgrave MacMillan eds. (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2017).
  • “New (Pan)-Africanism or Neoliberal Globalization? Introducing Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business” in James Conyers eds., Africana Social Stratification Africana Studies, Transaction Publishers (Transaction Publishers, 2017)
  • “Nigeria’s Non-Western Democracy: A Postcolonial Aspiration and Struggle with Opportunity, Conflict and Transformation”, in Carl Le Van and Patrick Ukata eds. The Oxford Handbook in Nigerian Politics, (Oxford University Press, 2018)
  • “African Economic Humanism: Africapitalism and Ubuntu Business” in Jean Ouderago, Mamadou Diawara, and Elisio Macamo eds., Translation: disputing the sense of African social realities Cambridge Scholars Press (Cambridge University Press,2019)
  • Neoliberal Democracy vs. Neoliberal Authoritarianism: Capitalism and Democracy’s Global Contest in the 21st Century” in Gordon Crawford and Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai’s Research Handbook in Democracy and Development (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021)
  • “From the First Black President to the First White President: Obama, Trump, and Race-craft in US-Africa Policy” in Ebenezer Obadare eds. Connections and Disconnections: Africa and the United States in the Age of Obama (forthcoming)

Additional Information

Receiving her PhD in politics from New York City’s New School for Social Research in 1999, Kiki has been a teacher-scholar and an academic administrator of graduate education and undergraduate studies for over twenty years. Prior to UMass Boston, Kiki was a Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public and International Affairs and the Director of the African American and African Studies at the university’s College of Arts and Letters. She was a former Deputy Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Kiki is an accomplished scholar and author of several academic books and scholarly articles on global development, democratization, African affairs, and race and identity. Some of Kiki’s recent books, The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Pan-Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business (2017). Her recent book Africa’s New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations (with Moses Khisa, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) received Choice Magazine’s 2022 rating as highly recommended reading. She also earned MSU’s Lilly Teaching Excellence Fellowship (2008-2009), the Academic Leadership Fellowship (2011-12), Detroit’s “Outstanding and Dedicated Service to the Community” award (2015), and she held an honorary appointment as research associate at the University of South Africa(UNISA), Pretoria.

Curriculum Vitae