Faculty Member, Politics and International Studies
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics
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Patrick McGowan
Hendrik Spruyt Peter McDonough |
About
I am Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast and received my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University.
My research background is in comparative politics and southern African politics, with a long standing interest in political economy and the history of political thought in terms of how these fields of study bear on our understanding of political transitions, development, democratisation and the evolving nature of the postcolonial world. More recently my research has increasingly become focussed on comparative and theoretical aspects of Anglo-American conservatism, in particular its relationship to classical liberalism and to the anti-Enlightenment tradition, as well as its applicability to the study of postcolonial politics.
Specific research interest include: the legacy of settler colonialism; state-business relations and their impact on development and democratisation; the history of capitalism in Southern Africa; corporate governance in developing countries; relations between North and South in the global economy; conservatism and economic development. Most of these research projects relate to my longstanding fascination with the philosophical and political origins of development as a concept and the theoretical debates on what constitutes development as defined by orthodox and post-development approaches to the subject.
My research at Queen’s has been funded by the ESRC World Economy and Finance Research Programme, the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation. Publications indicative of my key research interested have appeared in journals such as Political Studies, Political Geography, Business & Society, Third World Quarterly, Democratization, and Journal of Contemporary African Studies. I am the author of Africa’s Development Impasse: Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation (Zed Books) and am currently writing a book entitled Conservatism and Postcolonial Politics (under contract with Routledge).
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