London-based Royal African Society (RAS) has appointed Dr George M. Bob-Milliar as the new editor for its flagship journal. The “African Affairs” is the most prestigious and oldest African Studies journal.
Dr Bob-Milliar, a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Centre for Cultural and African Studies at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, becoming the second African/Ghanaian to edit the 120-year-old mainstream international journal which is published by Oxford University Press.
“African Affairs” is a highly respected and preeminent international journal of choice for Africanists, most widely read by academics and policymakers. It is the oldest Area Studies journal globally, the top-ranked journal in African Studies and ranked 48 out of 182 mainstream Political Science journal globally. It focuses on sub-Saharan African politics and international relations, sociology, anthropology, economics.
In an interview with the University Relations Office in KNUST, Dr Bob-Milliar expressed his honour for the appointment. He promised to use his tenure as an editor to encourage colleagues and graduate students to submit articles for consideration by the journal.
“I will use the ‘new author mentorship’ scheme to steer promising graduate students to submit their research to the journal,” he assured.
Dr Milliar’s research interests are African politics and social/political history, with a focus on party politics, informal institutions, regional development, migration, and African diaspora studies. He examines the evolution of party politics and the broader impacts on society and analyses and critiques political behaviour and election processes.
He also studies the historical and cultural context in which party politics operates and the effect of cultural/informal perceptions on political processes. He is building up a base of empirical case studies on various aspects of Ghana’s politics, which has made a valuable contribution to theories, methodologies and framings of African politics, social history, election processes and conceptions of democratisation.
His research builds up new critical contributions to political analysis on the African continent and as a valuable contribution to the development of African politics and the understanding of democratization issues. Besides, Ghana, he has conducted fieldwork in Uganda.
He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Uganda’s Makerere University, and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).
Also, he has been a ‘DAAD Guest Professorship in African Economic History’ at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany), and University of San Francisco (US).
Besides, African Affairs, he is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of African Political Economy & Development (based in South Africa), co-editor of African Economic History (based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison), co-editor of Contemporary Journal of African Studies (formerly known as Research Review based at University of Ghana, IAS). He sits on the editorial boards of the African Journal of Social Sciences Education (UEW), Babcock Journal of the Social Sciences (University of Babcock, Nigeria), and African Review of Economics & Finance (South Africa).
Dr Bob-Milliar is an excellent scholar with an impressive record of international peer-reviewed publications in highly esteemed journals/books. He is visible on many scholarly electronic sites.
He has a great citation profile on Google Scholar. He is among the top ten most cited scholars in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CoHSS) and the only top researcher with the most cited single-author publications in the college.
Bob-Milliar has written extensively on a catholic spread of issues/topics, from party activism to party factionalism, migration to development, and gender to transnationalism. His research and publications are of uniformly high quality and are very insightful. He is a thorough and conscientious researcher with good analytical skills. He has over 100 publications.
Dr Bob-Milliar scholarship has been honoured with several awards, including being a recipient of the prize for Exceptional Research by an emerging African scholar bestowed by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Waterloo, Canada; recipient of the maiden African Author Prize, the prestigious prize is awarded for the best article published in African Affairs by an author based in an African institution, or an African PhD student based in an overseas university. The prize is in recognition of excellent African scholarship, which often does not reach audiences outside the African continent; recipient of the Agyeman-Duah Prize for overall Best Graduate Student, Institute of African Studies-University of Ghana, Legon.
KNUST management has congratulated Dr George Bob-Milliar on his appointment.