Rebecca Tapscott is an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Politics and International Relations Department as well as at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include political violence, security, and non-democratic regimes; gender—particularly masculinities—and citizenship; international development; and research ethics governance. She is the author of "Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda" (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Rebecca's Ambizione project examines the transnational diffusion of ethics research regulations and the political consequences of this emergent regulatory framework for social sciences research, especially in non-democratic contexts. Rebecca also teaches at IHEID in the Power, Conflict, and Development Track. Rebecca holds a PhD from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She is the recipient of the Alfred Rubin Prize from the Fletcher School and the International Studies Association’s Carl Beck award.
Tapscott, Rebecca. Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Tapscott, Rebecca. "Vigilantes and the State: Understanding Violence through a Security Assemblages Approach." Perspectives on Politics (2021): 1-16.
Tapscott, R. "Militarized masculinity and the paradox of restraint: mechanisms of social control under modern authoritarianism," International Affairs (November 2020).
Abonga, F, R Kerali, H Porter and R Tapscott. "Naked bodies and collective action: repertoires of protest in Uganda’s militarised, authoritarian regime." Civil Wars, 2019.
Tapscott, R. "Conceptualizing Militias in Africa." In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press (2019).
Tapscott, R. “Policing men: Militarized masculinity, youth livelihoods, and security in conflict-affected northern Uganda” Disasters 42:S1 (2018), S119-S139.
Tapscott, R. “The government has long hands: Institutionalized arbitrariness and local security initiatives in northern Uganda” Development and Change 48:2 (2017), 263–285.
Tapscott, R. “Local security and the (un)making of public authority in Gulu, northern Uganda” African Affairs 116:462 (2017), 39-59.
Tapscott, R. “Where the wild things are not: Crime preventers and the 2016 Ugandan elections” Journal of Eastern African Studies 10:4 (2016), 693-712.