Before joining Glasgow in 2024, Rebecca held a post-doc and then an Ambizione Research Fellowship at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy (2017-2023), and was a Lecturer at University of York (2023-24). Rebecca has also held Visiting Fellowships at the London School of Economics, Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and at the University of Edinburgh’s Politics and International Relations Department. She holds a PhD from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She is a recipient of the Fletcher School’s Alfred Rubin Prize in International Law (2011) and the International Studies Association’s Carl Beck award for innovative research on emergent international concerns (2017).
Rebecca Tapscott
University of Glasgow
Research Interests:
Rebecca Tapscott is a political scientist whose work studies how authoritarian power is produced and contested. Her main research interests include how the state produces and projects political power; the relationship between gender, citizenship, and state authority; and how these processes can be studied ethically—as well as the politics of how these determinations is made. Her work has focused largely on Uganda, with a broader interest in how these processes unfold in the so-called “global South”. Rebecca is the author of "Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda" (Oxford University Press, 2021).
