Dr. Kaleb Demerew

Dr. Kaleb Demerew is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Center for Governance and Markets (University of Pittsburgh) and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hope College. His research focuses on state-building, conflict, and the comparative political economy of development. He is the author of two books, and over ten book chapters and journal articles published in reputable outlets such as Nations and Nationalism, Third World Quarterly, and the Journal of Institutional Economics. He has has secured several competitive research grants and fellowships from the Institute for Humane Studies, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, the Center for Governance and Markets, and the Mercatus Center. He earned his PhD in Politics and International Affairs from the University of South Florida.

Contractualist State-building and Economic Freedom in Africa (Routledge, 2026) asks what kinds of state-society arrangements can support economic freedom, and, by extension, durable state-building in Africa.  Cases on Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Somaliland help illustrate how the prevalence or absence of economic freedom and self-governance norms may catalyze or hinder state-building. The book shows why stable, organic states in Africa can only emerge through a "facilitator state", a state where institutions work to facilitate and codify free, voluntary transactions among autonomous individuals.

Violence and State-Building (forthcoming with SUNY Press) configures an elite-centered, ethnicity-mediated institutional framework to assess state-building trajectories in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts in three African states. The book examines how ruling and contending elites deploy violence and the threat of it alongside offers of rents, understood as special access to political or economic goods, and how these interactions shape political order. To illustrate these dynamics, the book uses a comparative case analysis of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Sudan.

Nile Basin Politics (Edward Elgar, 2025) is an edited volume that  examines how political elites instrumentalize Nile basin rivalries to bolster domestic state-building and nationalist aspirations. The contributing authors illustrate the incentives that make short-term collaboration difficult to achieve for different stakeholders. Challenging conventional assumptions about the possibilities of basin-wide cooperation, the book proposes bilateral and multilateral policy coordination as a pragmatic alternative for short-term water diplomacy in the region.