Rahmane Idrissa is a GEG Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow. He was born in Niger and first went to University in Senegal, at the University Cheikh Anta Diop, taking courses in Philosophy and Political Science. He wrote a Philosophy Maîtrise thesis in 1998 on the political geography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau before beginning his research into the decade-long democratic transition of Niger in the 1990s. In 2001 he won a Fulbright fellowship to study in the Political Science program of the University of Kansas and then began a PhD at the University of Florida in 2003. His doctorate examined the relations between the liberal democratic civil society and the Islamic civil society (or ‘clerical society’) in the ways in which they shape Nigerien governance agendas within a much-weakened state. Alongside this work, Rahmane has also written and published on other issues, such as maternal health care and political development in the West African Sahel. As a GLF Fellow, Rahmane worked on the political economy of regional integration in West Africa. He returned to Niger after his year at Princeton and started teaching at the University of Niamey in September 2011.

He can be contacted at: abdouramane[AT]gmail.com