Dr. Ivor Chipkin

Dr. Ivor Chipkin is the Director of the Government and Public Policy Think Tank, based in Johannesburg. He was the founder and director of the Public Affairs Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town for ten years before that. Chipkin helped pioneer the study of organisations and institutions in South Africa and has published widely on questions of government, administration and the state in South Africa and in Africa. Chipkin also has strong theoretical interests and has published on questions related to democratic theory and nationalism. In 2017 Chipkin, with several colleagues, wrote and released the Betrayal of the Promise report, a study of state capture that had a huge political impact in South Africa. It is also widely regarded as an important theoretical contribution to the field. Chipkin completed his PhD at the Ecole Normale Superieure in France, where he also did his DEA. He was an Oppenheimer Fellow at Oxford University and is a Senior Associate Member of St Anthony’s college. He is the author of “Do South Africans Exist?” (WUP: 2007) and “Shadow State: the politics of state capture” with Mark Swilling (WUP: 2018). His new book, “The Shattered Vessel”, is due out in 2023.