Mike McGovern

Mike McGovern is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has worked as a professor at Yale and as the West Africa Project Director of the International Crisis Group. His research and teaching focus on the cultural politics of the socialist and post-socialist state in Guinea, on conflict and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa, and more broadly on youth, politics, and the uses of culture in West Africa and Southeast Asia.

His first book, Making War in Côte d'Ivoire, explores the dramaturgy, sociology, and political economy of the Ivorian civil conflict. His second book, Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern, is about the intertwined processes of state formation and ethnogenesis in Guinea during the 1958-1984 socialist period. His most recent book, A Socialist Peace? explores the paradox of how a coercive and repressive form of rule may have provided Guineans with forms of social resilience that assisted them in navigating the threats of war that troubled West Africa over the past twenty years.