Political Science Faculty

Lauren Honig researches and teaches on comparative politics and the political economy of development in African countries, with a focus on property rights, citizen-state linkages, customary authority, and informal institutions. 

Her book, Land Politics: How Customary Institutions Shape State Building in Zambia and Senegal (Cambridge University Press), examines the struggle to control land in Africa through the lens of land titling. Based on extensive fieldwork, it shows how customary institutions impact the contemporary expansion of state property rights, in an era of increasing land scarcity and booming global land markets. Her research has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, and Fulbright, among others. It has been published in journals including African Affairs, the American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Democratization, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and World Development.

She is a Research Associate at the Governance Local Development Institute at the University of Gothenburg. In addition, she has been a visiting Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her B.A. at Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in Government at Cornell University.