Dr Tessa Devereaux

Tessa Devereaux is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies.

Tessa’s research interests include civil war, gender politics, rebel governance and state-building. Currently, she is working on her first monograph, titled ‘To Have and to Hold: The Drivers of Rebel Gender Governance’. The book looks at why and how armed groups change local gender norms during conflict. Using an original dataset of over 200 armed groups combined with qualitative case studies of Mali and Eritrea, it makes the case that armed groups use gender to reshape local power relations, undermine civilian elites and establish social control. Tessa is also working on a series of projects on the legacies of insurgency, the determinants of repatriation and minority rights after conflict.

Tessa's research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar award, a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholarship and an ISA Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She has published in International Organization and Comparative Political Studies among others.

Before joining SOAS, she was a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at New College Oxford and a Guest Teacher at the LSE. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, an MSc from University of Oxford and a BA in Politics from the University of Cambridge. Tessa currently convenes a postgraduate module on Methodology in the Social Sciences and another on Gender and Security in Africa.

• Devereaux, Tessa. The Determinants of Insurgent Gender Governance, International Organization 79, no. 1 (2025): 36–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818324000419.
• Devereaux Evans, Tessa. (2023). Conflict and Coalition: Securing LGBT Rights in the Face of Hostility, Comparative Political Studies. 57. 10.1177/00104140231193012.
• Devereaux Evans, T., and Nicolas van de Walle. The Impact of Foreign Aid, Routledge Handbook of Democratization in Africa, Routledge, 2019, pp. 63–77.

• Civil war
• Gender politics
• Rebel governance
• State-building

https://tessadevereaux.com