Robert Bates

Who is Robert Bates?

Robert Hinrichs Bates is an American political scientist. He is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government in the Departments of Government and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Since 2000, he has also served as Professeur associe, School of Economics, University of Toulouse.

After graduating from Haverford College in 1964, Bates took his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also studied anthropology and economics at the graduate level. He joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1969. From 1985 until 1993 he was Luce Professor of Political Economy at Duke University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Bates’s research focuses on the political economy of development, particularly in Africa. Starting with field work in the mining townships of the Copperbelt he subsequently conducted field work in the Luapula Valley of Zambia; the relationship between town and country continues to mark his work. Expanding the scope of his research to include countries in Eastern and Western Africa as well, he addresses the politics of agricultural development and food supply just at the time that dearth and famine increasingly arose on the continent. Embraced by major figures on the left and supporters of the gathering “Washington Consensus” on the right, the book exerted major influence in the policy world as well as in academia.