Sishuwa Sishuwa

Sishuwa Sishuwa is a Senior Lecturer in History at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Sishuwa was previously a Lecturer in African History at the University of Zambia (UNZA) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, MSc in African Studies (Oxford), and BA in African History from UNZA.

Sishuwa researches the political history of southern Africa since the twentieth century, focusing primarily on elections, leadership, ethnicity, historical biography, populism, civil society, racial nationalism, and the challenges of state sovereignty and political sustainability in national and regional contexts. He has edited three special issues of academic journals and authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications. His books include Party Politics and Populism in Zambia (James Currey, 2024) and the Cambridge History of Democracy in Africa (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), co-edited with Nic Cheeseman, Maame Gyekye-Jandoh, and Edalina Rodrigues Sanches. He is currently writing two more monographs, Gunning for Democracy: Why the Military Upholds Democracy in Malawi, and Why Leaders Fail: Presidential Decision-Making in Zambia, 2015-2021.

Sishuwa is a leader of the Southern African Historical Society, an Iso Lomso Fellow of Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, a member of the American Historical Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, United Kingdom. He serves on the editorial boards of several international journals such as Populism, the Journal of African History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and the South African Historical Journal. A strong advocate for good governance and human rights, Sishuwa regularly provides highly regarded commentary on African politics to international media outlets including Washington Post, BBC, and Mail & Guardian, and has consulted for, amongst others, Amnesty International, the Open Society Foundation and several Western missions in southern Africa.