Kimuli Kasara, associate professor of political science at Columbia University, passed away aged 48 in November 2025 in New York City, following a long illness. She is survived by her siblings Mbabazi, Hoche, and Tendo in the United States; extended family in Kenya and Uganda; and many, many friends around the world. She was a beloved colleague and mentor around the discipline and a leading scholar of taxation, identity, diversity, voting, and political violence which she approached with great care, creativity, and modesty.
Kimuli grew up in Canada, Kenya, India, and the U.K., before receiving her BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from St. Peter’s College, Oxford University, in 1999 and her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2006. She started at Columbia University as an assistant professor in 2006 and spent her entire career there, holding fellowships at the University of Goethenberg, Wissenschafts Zentrum Berlin (WZB), and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
In her academic work, Kimuli was guided by a keen feel for the practice of politics and repeatedly forced us to look at received wisdom in a new light. In “Tax Me If You Can: Ethnic Geography, Democracy, and the Taxation of Agriculture in Africa,” she took advantage of overlaps in ethnic identity and crop type across 30 African countries to show that governments taxed co-ethnic farmers at higher rates instead of favoring them with lower rates, as conventional wisdom held. She explained this outcome by noting that leaders could better monitor and target co-ethnics who, like core voters in other settings, had weaker incentives to defect-an argument that is obvious ex post, but only ex post.
Similarly, in “When Do the Rich Vote Less than the Poor and Why: Explaining Turnout Inequality Across the World,” she and her former student, Pavithra Suryanarayan, showed that the prevailing view that the wealthy vote at higher rates than the poor is largely confined to industrialized democracies where bureaucratic capacity is high and redistribution is politically salient. However, in many developing countries where, without these conditions, the tax exposure of the wealthy is more limited, the wealthy have weaker incentive to participate in politics through voting. This work upended canonical tax and transfer models of politics, reoriented our attention to why the wealthy vote, and changed how we think about state capacity and participation.
Kimuli’s attention to big questions was matched with careful data collection in her research on diversity, violence and trust. In “Separate and Suspicious: Local Social and Political Context and Ethnic Tolerance in Kenya,” she created an original data set of local ethnic diversity and spatial segregation in Kenya by coding the ethnicity of the names on voter registers at the polling station level. She found that people living in more diverse communities expressed higher levels of interethnic trust, even when political competition was high–a finding at odds with expectations and one that prompts further investigation of non-material sources of ethnic animosity.
Kimuli’s creativity and deep attention to details were also on full display in how she addressed some of the measurement and endogeneity issues that complicate our understanding of the consequences of ethnic diversity. In “Does Local Ethnic Segregation Lead to Violence: Evidence from Kenya,” Kimuli used an original dataset of colonial-era cadastral maps to construct an instrument for contemporary segregation at the local level to show that local segregation eroded interethnic trust and contributed to post-election violence as measured through satellite images of fires in the Rift Valley. Kimuli also wrote several working papers and what she modestly called “resting papers” that are discussed by Macartan Humphreys in the Spring 2026 APSA-CP newsletter.
Beyond her academic research, she was a superb teacher with high standards and great empathy. For many years, she taught Introduction to Comparative Politics and was a devoted leader of the senior honors thesis seminar. She worked with top students and those who needed more help with equal care and was especially proud of the “repeat customers” who took multiple classes with her. To relieve the tedium of teaching African politics on Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kimuli encouraged students to scour the internet for election campaign songs and awarded prizes to videos that received the most and fewest votes from the class. For her efforts, in 2019 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty award–Columbia’s highest honor for teaching.
Her greatest contribution to Columbia was her work in the Comparative Politics Research Workshop, which she co-organized for many years. Page Fortna captured her usual role when we opened the floor for questions: “Everyone in the room knew that Kimuli would make clear the most essential point of concern, and, unnervingly, she would do so with gentleness and even a sense of humor. Then we would all sigh and think to ourselves, “Humm, why didn’t I think of that…” To honor her memory, the workshop has been renamed the Kimuli Kasara Workshop on Comparative Politics.
Kimuli held many service roles at Columbia, and in every meeting was a voice of moral clarity. She was committed to the idea that the quality of work and sound principles could and should determine outcomes, and her approach to committee meetings was simple: “She Who Reads, Wins.” Kimuli also did the invisible work on which any good department depends. She attended practice job talks for students with interests far from hers, gave students career and life advice, and was the colleague who always read the paper before the seminar.
She was also a key figure in efforts to diversify the department. As a Black woman, Kimuli was both sensitive to the difference that timely mentoring and support could make for students from underrepresented groups, and attuned to the dangers of creating the impression that these scholars had not earned their place by their own merit. With this thoughtfulness, she helped to institutionalize support for graduate students from underrepresented groups and represented the department many times at the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute. Her service extended beyond the department where she was Board Member at the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review and the Working Group on African Political Economy.
Kimuli read widely and enjoyed discussing big ideas in history, politics and literature. She tried to read the Booker Prize finalists each year, was partial to any story involving scam artists, cheaters, and political chicanery, and eagerly awaited Robert Caro’s fifth volume on LBJ. A gifted storyteller, she loved nothing more than a good joke and a good laugh. And what a laugh it was; honest, quick, occasionally booming, and always irrepressible. A visit with Kimuli frequently ended with a funny anecdote or her signature eye roll that let us see her bemusement with the world.
She loved her friends and they loved her. During her illness, they traveled from as far as Fiji and Europe to spend time with her. And they came in droves. She had so many visitors that a nurse asked whether she was a politician.
Kimuli will be remembered for her scholarly contributions, high standards, and great integrity, but also for her quiet kindnesses, sharp wit, and infectious smile. She was a great friend and confidante who made each day brighter. We will miss her terribly.
