Why Ruling Elites Play the 'Ethnic Card': State Violence and Multiparty Transitions

Linda Kirschke is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, in the Department of Politics, and her research focuses on state politics and ethnic violence. She published "Informal repression, zero sum politics and late third wave transitions" in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 2000. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, this article shows that transitions to multiparty politics place Sub-Saharan South Africa at high risk for civil violence. Kirschke was a Eurasia Title VIII Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in 2002-03, working on Russian language training. In 2003-04, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia Universityís Council for European Studies. Kirschke has a BA in French and African studies and has worked for human rights organizations in France, London and Africa.