Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and was formerly the Director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He is the recipient of the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratisation (2015). He is also the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (Cambridge, 2015), the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, a former editor of the journal African Affairs and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel.