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Dave Throup

Adjunct Lecturer

  • Campus Location: Washington DC

About

David Throup read history at Cambridge and politics at the London School of Economics, before spending three years teaching at a Nairobi school.  Returning to Cambridge, he completed a Ph.D. on the economic and social background to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and became a Fellow of Magdalene College.  After teaching at the University of Virginia and Northeastern University in Boston, he returned to Britain to teach at Keele University and London University's Institute of Commonwealth Studies, before becoming a British diplomat in the 1990s, serving as Senior Research Officer for Africa.  Besides providing political analysis on some twenty countries in West and East Africa, ranging from Cote d'Ivoire to Chad, and Somalia to Tanzania, he had thematic responsibility for democracy promotion and elections.  He has participated in 17 election observation missions and was in charge of the international observation of the 1997 Kenya elections.  His final appointment in 2000 was as First Secretary (Political) in Zimbabwe.  Since 2001, he has been a Senior Associate with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has taught at SAIS and George Washington University.  From 2013-2015, he also served as Chair for the Eastern and Southern Africa courses at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, preparing Foreign Service and USAID Officers about to serve in the region.  He is the author of The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, Multi-Party Politics in Kenya, and has edited 12 volumes of documents from the Foreign Office Confidential Prints on southern Africa.  He is currently completing a biography of Jomo Kenyatta and working on religion and politics in Kenya, exploring the role of Pentecostalism and radical Islam.

Expertise