Jessica Piombo, Ph.D.
| Biography Jessica Piombo, Ph.D. Director, RSEP Planning and Content Assistant Professor, Department of National Security Affairs |  |
| Jessica Piombo is an Assistant Professor and Regional Coordinator for Sub-Saharan Africa in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), where she teaches courses on African politics, comparative politics, and ethnic politics and conflicts. Piombo is a research associate at Stanford's Center for African Studies, and a former visiting scholar at both the Centre for Social Science Research and the African Studies Centre of the University of Cape Town. Piombo’s research specializes on terrorism and countering terrorism in Africa, democratization and electoral politics, transitional regimes and post-conflict governance, institutional ways to channel and shape political identities, and the causes and management of ethnic conflict. Piombo has lectured at sea to deploying navy and marines about the Horn of Africa, and has twice provided specialized education to the commander and staff of the Combined Joint Task Force, Horn of Africa. She joined NPS in 2003 after completing her Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Piombo is the editor of Electoral Politics in South Africa: Assessing the First Democratic Decade (with Lia Nijzink, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) and Interim Governments: Institutional Bridges to Peace and Democracy? (with Karen Guttieri, forthcoming from USIP Press). She has authored numerous articles, including “Political Institutions, Social Demographics and the Decline of Ethnic Mobilization in South Africa, 1994–1999," Party Politics (July 2005) and “Opposition Parties and the Voters In South Africa's 1999 Election,” (with Robert Mattes, Democratization, Autumn 2001), and several book chapters. Piombo has conducted extensive research in South Africa, having lived there for almost two years between 1999 and 2001, and has worked with the University of Cape Town, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the University of Durban-Westville, and as an election monitor and member of the Steering Committee of the Peace Monitoring Forum of the Western Cape. Printable version | |