Author Archive

Fredrik Uggla

Professor Fredrik Uggla holds the chair of Latin American studies at Stockholm University, and is the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the same university. He holds a doctorate in political science from Uppsala University, and is an associate professor of political science at the same university. He has been a visiting researcher at several different academic institutions in Chile and Uruguay, and was a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s college in Oxford 2001-2002.

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A couple of days into the Egyptian revolution of 2011, I sat down at my kitchen table in Cairo, to write a memo for my colleagues at the Swedish embassy. My intention was to summarise what political science could offer in terms of predictions on the immediate future of the incipient democratisation process. It should have been a simple task. Before joining the embassy, I had had an academic career in political science; I had obtained my PhD on a thesis on comparative democratisation, and had later become an associate professor in political science. Summing up the main points of democratisation theory—one of the most vigorous subject areas of comparative politics—did not prove a problem. Hard-liners and soft-liners, the role …