PhD Studentship - Electoral integrity in the East African Community (EAC)

Project title: Regional Organisations and Electoral integrity peer review mechanisms in Africa (RO & EIPRMs).

Funder: The Leverhulme Trust

Lead investigators: Dr Innocent Batsani-Ncube (QMUL) and Anna Mwaba (Smith College).

PhD theme: The evolution and politics of electoral integrity peer review mechanisms in the East African Community (EAC).

Supervisors: Dr Innocent Batsani-Ncube and Dr Keren Weitzberg (Queen Mary, University of London).

Specification

The School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London welcomes applications for a fully funded PhD Studentship. The candidate will conceptualise a coherent research project, conduct fieldwork and produce a PhD thesis of publishable quality on the evolution and politics of electoral integrity peer review mechanisms in the East African Community (EAC). The candidate will be expected to review the political and governance instruments of the East African Community (EAC), explore the evolution of EAC electoral integrity peer review mechanisms (EIPRMs) and analyse how the EAC EIPRMs are formulated, operationalised and/or contested. The candidate will conduct a single in-depth case study or a comparative study of the development of internal electoral integrity mechanisms in two or all the original three EAC Partner States - Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. This will include exploring how election management systems such as digital electoral infrastructures, bvr technologies, electoral courts are reshaping electoral integrity mechanisms or producing new contestations around electoral integrity. The candidate will situate in-country electoral integrity mechanisms within the broader EAC framework and investigate the role that the case study countries have played in shaping the regional EIPRMs context and the ways and extent to which the countries have enabled or impeded the effective implementation of the EAC EIPRMs. Furthermore, the candidate will also be expected to provide intellectual and administrative support to the wider project through conducting literature reviews, writing blog articles for the project website, organising seminars and academic panels and managing the project’s public-facing communication channels.

Eligibility: The candidate should:

Be able to commence the PhD studies by the 01^st of July 2025 (hard deadline).

Hold a first class (distinction) master’s degree or at least 2:1 classification (or the equivalent) in Politics and International Relations or a related social science discipline. The grade of the dissertation component of the master’s degree should be 70% or above. 

Ideally have minimum two years field experience working in the politics and governance sector in East Africa.

Have initial high-level professional contacts in East African regional and country institutions that include but are not limited to electoral commissions, ministries of foreign affairs, national and EAC legislatures, judiciaries, and government bureaucracies. Alternatively, the candidate should demonstrate a practical strategy to gain access to interview subjects.

Have some experience in writing blog articles and use of social media for professional communication.

What we offer:

Tuition: The studentship is open to international students as it covers either UK home or international fees in full for the three years. Overseas fees are currently pegged at £23,050 per year. 

Maintenance: The studentship covers maintenance stipend at UKRI rates for the three years. The maintenance stipend is pegged at £20,622 per year.

Visa reimbursement: Upon production of receipts the successful candidate will be reimbursed up to £822 for visa fees, £3104 for the NHS surcharge and £200 for visa medical checkup expenses.

Inbound flight: Upon production of a receipt, the successful candidate will be reimbursed for a one-way economy flight ticket to London at the start of the studentship.

Fieldwork expenses: The studentship has a small travel grant to cover fieldwork expenses including for conducting electoral observation of General Elections in an East African country.

Conference Travel: The studentship includes a grant to attend two major academic conferences, the 2026 African Studies Association - UK conference and the 2027 European Conference on African Studies.

Application package  

1. Apply to the QMUL PhD programme and submit your application reference number: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/study/phd/postgraduatestudentships/ then select ‘PhD/full-time/Semester 1 September start’

      2.Include a one-page cover letter that explicitly explains how you meet the PhD Studentship eligibility criteria.

      3.Use the SPIR format to submit a two-thousand-word PhD research proposal.

      4.Include your CV, all University transcripts (undergraduate and postgraduate) and 2 reference letters as attachments.

      5.Please quote the reference: Ib’s RO & EIPRMs project when you submit your application.

Application Deadline: 23:55 on Friday 9^th May 2025

Further Details:

The successful candidate will be offered a formal studentship award letter which will be separately provided from the QMUL Offer of Admission into the PhD Programme – which is subject to standard checks for eligibility.

For further details, you can contact Dr Innocent Batsani-Ncube at i.ncube@qmul.ac.uk

Main project overview

The Leverhulme Trust funded RO & EIPRMS project aims to co-generate original conceptual insights into the interests and power dynamics that inform the negotiation and implementation – inclusive of acceptance and pushback – of electoral integrity peer review mechanisms within African regional organisations (ROs). In this project, African ROs are understood to be voluntary associations of states from Africa’s geographic zones. Examples include the East African Community (EAC), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Although these organisations were founded for economic cooperation by non-democratic one-party state regimes, after the cold war era they integrated regional democracy building as a core tenet of their overt operations (Boutros-Ghali,1992; Pevehouse,2002).

The African ROs have since developed elaborate mechanisms to promote and encourage the conduct of democratic elections in their member states’ territories. The mechanisms include summit level electoral peer review channels, written down (and agreed to) principles and guidelines for holding democratic elections, electoral advisory bodies, electoral observation missions and intra-regional post-election conflict resolution conventions. We collectively refer to these mechanisms as electoral integrity peer review mechanisms (EIPRMs). Therefore, regional EIPRMs are the institutional and operational mechanisms that enjoin member states to conduct elections that meet the electoral integrity test.

Electoral integrity refers to elections that meet the express standards provided for in national, regional, and international statutes and conventions (Norris,2014). There is legitimate expectation that all member states who would have signed up to these mechanisms should aim at holding elections that meet or surpass the established standards. 

Western liberal democracies, African and International democracy building organisations and scholars of democratisation have invested financial, technical, and intellectual resources to support the institutional design, operation, and monitoring of the EIPRMs.  However, despite the sustained financial, organisational, and intellectual investment, the ROs EIPRMs are not working as intended. Far from positively shaping the nature and character of electoral integrity in their respective regions, the ROs ostensibly enable authoritarianism through providing external legitimacy to electoral autocrats (Stoddard,2017; Debre, 2021; Debre, 2022). Rather than enforce the impartial EIPRM framework, regional elites are more inclined towards extending unqualified solidarity to ‘offending’ state parties (Batsani-Ncube,2023). However, the extant literature on regional organisations and electoral integrity in Africa inadequately addresses this phenomenon. We still do not know how and under what conditions this happens especially in the context of the presence of explicit regional guidelines and principles governing the conduct of democratic elections.