Douglas Yates

Professor Yates has just published his article on "Modern Dynastic Rule" in the Oxford University Press Online Bibliographies.

Based on four years of research for a new book that he is writing, this article allowed Yates to share the broad scope of contemporary dynasties which rule over a quarter of the states in the modern world system, including traditional monarchies (absolute and constitutional), democratic 'political families,' and authoritarian 'dynastic republics' (the last being the subject of his forthcoming book).

In his annotated bibliography, Yates covers the sources for an understanding of the debated anthropological concept of family kinship and sociological theories of patrimonial rule, as well as some grounding in psychological theories of family influence on individual personality, as well as national histories and biographies about very different peoples and cultures. The questions that he points are: Why do we accept to be ruled by families? What kind of atavistic behavior is this? Does dynastic style really provide a comparative advantage? How should we study these omnipresent phenomena? No modern textbook in comparative politics is available on modern dynastic rule per se, so we tend to borrow from the classics of Antiquity or from sociology’s theory of patrimonialism, anthropological theories of kinship, psychological theories of personality, political histories, biographies, and journalism. This leads to an eclectic bibliography, if intended for political scientists.

"When I first started to do research on dynastic rule, I naively presumed that it would be easy to find books on a topic so omnipresent in time and space. Surely the subject of dynasty could not have escaped its theoretician. In my discipline – political science – we theorize about every imaginable kind of system: presidential, parliamentary, communist, capitalist, unitary, federal, military, civilian, authoritarian, democratic. So given the great number of dynasties in the world, it did not seem at all unreasonable to hope that someone somewhere would have already written a book on dynastic systems. But surprisingly a general work on the politics of modern dynastic rule does not exist, not yet."

Oxford Bibliographies provides a pathway to resources for academic topics, a database of articles, an authoritative guide to current scholarship, written and reviewed by experts, with commentary and annotations.

(Note that access to Yates's article requires a subscription to the Oxford Bibliographies.)

Professor Yates has been invitated to participate in a workshop at the London School of Economics, Oct 16-17th 2015, as a country expert on oil-rich Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. This is part of a larger LSE project comparing 'oil-rentier' states in Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) regions. Researchers who have already confirmed their attendance in London include Farrukh Iqbal and Shanta Devarajan (World Bank), Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (Oxford University), Catherine Boone (LSE), Michael Herb (Georgia), and Ishac Diwan (Harvard/Dauphine), promising to fill a gap in the literature with a multi-author book, a 'small-n' qualitative comparative 'closed-universe' analysis of two critical oil-exporting regions.

Professor Yates was also invited by the German Development Institute (GDI) to deliver two lectures on “Inequality and Resources: The Great Struggle for African Oil” as a guest in GDI's 13th annual Global Governance School, Sep 10th 2015. This invitation follows Professor Yates' lecture series delivered in 2013 at the University of Kassel, Germany on his last book The Scramble for African Oil (London: Pluto Press: 2012), which was reviewed by the Journal of Modern African Studies and Foreign Affairs. Located in Bonn, GDI is one of Germany's leading global think tanks on international development and cooperation that develops concepts, formulates policy, and provides practical training for ministries, governments and international organizations.

Professor Douglas Yates was invited by Oxford University Press to author a bibliographic article on Modern Dynastic Rule in the series Oxford Bibliographies online.

One quarter of the countries in the world today have as their head of state or their head of government a member of a 'dynasty', that is, a succession of people from the same family who play a prominent role in politics and government. Some are constitutional monarchs, others absolute; some are 'dynastic republics' – often called 'neo-patrimonial' regimes – others are famous 'political families' in modern democracies. Dynastic rule has existed in all times of human history. It exists in all regions of the world today. What are the reasons for the longevity, adaptability and perserverence of dynastic rule?

Douglas Yates' article will provide a narrative pathway through about a hundred existing publications that address these various aspects of dynastic rule. The article will be organized in subtopics: constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, democratic republics, authoritarian republics, anthropology of kinship, psychology of the family, sociology of patrimonial rule, and political science theories of dynasties.

Oxford Bibliographies was developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide. It combines the features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopaedia and has become one of the most authoritative research resources for students and scholars across the world.

Professor Yates has published a chapter entitled "The Rise and Fall of Oil-Rentier States in Africa" in New Approaches to the Governance of Natural Resources: Insights from Africa (J. Andrew Grart, W.R. Nadège Compaoré and Matthew I. Mitchell, eds., Palgrave MacMillan 2015).

This book demonstrates the resurgent economic and geopolitical importance of Africa evidenced by the growing investment by China, India, the United States, Brazil, and other countries in the sub-continents natural resources such as oil, biofuels, forestry, fisheries, and minerals.

Yates' chapter covers the oil industry, using the theory of the rentier state as a template to compare the oil-dependency, inequality, a corrupt rentier mentality, enclave industrialization, decline of agriculture, high vulnerability to oil price shocks, and a long chain of causation, surprisingly negative, coming out of what appears at fist to be a blessing of oil revenues. Ultimately, Yates concludes, "the decline and fall of oil-rentier states will be the unintended consequence of their regimes living off unearned oil revenues, instead of attending to the genuine developmental needs of their domestic populations." (p. 62)

See book on publisher's website

Like every year since the first edition of the Africa Yearbook (Leiden: Brill) in 2004, Professor Yates authored the chapter on Gabon in the 2014 edition. This year, also featured is AGS alumnus Joseph Mangarella, who authored the chapter on Equatorial Guinea. Joseph Mangarella completed his Master's degree in International Relations and Diplomacy at AGS, with an area concentration in African Studies, and was Professor Yates' student and thesis advisee. He is now working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, as well as teaching Legal English at the prestigious Université de Paris II-Assas law school in Paris.

"Joe was always a meticulous student, and I am not suprised that he has been recruited to work on an important reference publication in African Studies, nor am I suprised that his chapter is very well researched and well written," says Professor Yates.

Each year, The Africa Yearbook offers a systematic listing and analysis of all the major events and developments that took place over one calendar year in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the foreign policy sector as well as in the domestic political, economic and social spheres. Its comprehensive format and thorough academic quality make it used as a reference book by scholars and students as well as by politicians, diplomats, journalists, business professionals and practitioners in the field of development aid.

Professor Yates was interviewed for Al Jazeera’s flagship discussion show ‘Empire’ about the increasing presence of Chinese, French and American military forces and business interests on the African continent. This show will be broadcast this Sunday, July 27, at 20h00 GMT, under 'What does this New Scramble for Africa mean for Africans?'

The interview took place on the rooftops of Paris and was conducted by Marwan Bishra, the senior political analyst of Al Jazeera English and the host of the show. ‘Empire’ reports on and debates global powers, on behalf of an international citizen, in a way that questions geo-political, geo-economic, and corporate power which influences them across borders. It airs on the last Sunday of every month at 20h00 GMT at is rebroadcast during the following week on Monday (12h00) Tuesday (1h00) and Wednesday (6h00).

A specialist of African politics, Douglas Yates will teach a seminar at AGS this Fall, entitled ‘The Scramble for African Resources.’ His latest book, The Scramble for African Oil (London: Pluto Press, 2012) has received positive reviews in Foreign Affairs, New Political Science and the African Studies Review.

Professor Yates published a chapter on the environmental history of "Port Gentil: From Forestry Capital to Energy Capital," in Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), an edited volume by Joseph A. Pratt, Martin V. Melosi and Kathleen A. Brosnan. This work came out of a conference at the University of Houston in 2010, which was funded with the support of the National Science Foundation to promote research energy history and its intersection with urban and environmental history. The cities in this volume represent important energy capitals in the fossil fuel era. Studying the evolution of energy capital reveals similarities and differences useful in understanding historical patterns of energy-led development where it takes place. This study of energy capitals contributes a long-term perspective to current debates about the best ways to capture the benefits while managing the costs of such energy development.

See book description on University of Pittsburgh Press website

On October 8th, Professor Yates traveled to Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, Iraq to present a paper on "Ethnicity, Violence and Oil-Rent in Gabon" for an international scientific colloquium hosted by the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), one of the oldest French institutions specialized in the study of the Near East. His paper described how the influx of massive amounts of oil revenues contributes to numerous grievances, which can give rise to and perpetuate ethnic conflict. Other participants included Raid Fahmi (former Minister of Sciences, Baghdad), Ahmed Al Shamma (former Deputy Minister of Oil in Iraq), and Luis Martinez (CERI, Science-Po Paris).

On the occasion of this colloquium, Professor Yates was invited to join a new research group on the political-anthropology of petroleum. This research group will meet in different oil-regions around the world to study their social transformations and state trajectories.

See photos:

On August 30th, Douglas Yates was invited by the Center for Conflict Resolution to Stellenbosch, South Africa, to present a paper on "The French Peacekeeping Role in Africa", to be published in a forthcoming edited volume. This presentation was part of a conference on the theme of “Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding in Africa,”In his paper, Professor Yates discusses how Johan Galtung’s concepts of positive and negative peace can be used as criteria to evaluate recent French interventions in Ivory Coast, Mali, DRC and CAR.

Other participants in the conference included Ambassador James Jonah (former UN Undersecretary General for Political Affairs), Ibrahim Gambari (former head of UNAMID in Darfur), Ambassador Francis Deng (UN Representative for South Sudan) Ambassador John Hirsch (former US ambassador to Sierra Leone), Dr. Mary Chinery-Hesse (AU Panel of the Wise), and Professor Margaret Vogt (head of BINUCA in Central African Republic).

Established by the University of Cape Town in 1968 as an independent nonprofit organization, the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) is dedicated to training, mediation, research, policy development and capacity building in the field of conflict prevention, management and resolution. It was ranked #6 in the top 50 think tanks in Sub-Saharan Africa in the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings, which did a comprehensive ranking of 6,603 think tanks in 182 countries.

More information on the Center for Conflict Resolution

In July and August, Professor Yates was invited to teach in the summer program at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU), a partner institution of the American Graduate School in Paris. He taught two courses, Comparative politics and Transitions to Democracy.

Yates says: "Having taught African politics for many years at the American Graduate School in Paris, usually recounting the dismal stories of corrupt elites, hereditary dictators, and bloodthirsty tyrants, it was a pleasure to cover the recent proliferation of competitive, multiparty elections.  The question underlying this course was whether or not competitive elections since the end of the Cold War have been reinforcing democracy, or contributing instead to the durability of authoritarian rule.  Having discussed this topic at an AGS Wine and Cheese evening during the spring semester, it was interesting to have the chance to see how students that summer in Hawaii responded to the same issues.  Several of my HPU students were on the G.I. Bill, and had just returned from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, so their experiences of unsuccessful democratic consolidation shaped their perception of analogous African efforts.  I really enjoyed having lively debates about African politics through the lens of American interventions in the Middle East, and brought back to Paris many new and useful perspectives to apply in my classes at AGS.”

During his stay, Professor Yates was interviewed on the local TV channel ThinkTech TV, where he answered questions by Patrick Bratton, Director of the Diplomacy and Military Studies department at HPU, on the subject of his most recently published book, The Scramble for African Oil (London: Pluto Press, 2012)

View interview