Bruce Gilley

Bruce Gilley (born July 21, 1966) is a Canadian–American professor of political science and director of the PhD program in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. He is the founder and President of the Oregon Association of Scholars, member of the Heterodox Academy and founding signatory of the Oregon Academic Faculty Pledge on Freedom. Gilley gained international acclaim but also a storm of criticism for his highly controversial peer-reviewed article The Case for Colonialism, published in an advance online edition of the scientific journal Third World Quarterly in 2017. Fifteen members of the journal's board resigned over Gilley's article. Prof. Dr. Bruce Gilley a Canadian born American of Scottish decent received his Bachelor of Arts in economics and international relations from the University of Toronto in 1988. As a Commonwealth Scholar he did his Master of Economics at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 1991, and went to China to spend a year teaching English. From 1992 to 2002, he worked as a journalist in Hong Kong writing for the Eastern Express newspaper and then the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine where his biggest scoop was exposing an illicit technology transfer by a Stanford professor to China's military. Gilley was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton University from 2004 to 2006 from where he received his PhD in politics in 2007. He became an associate professor in 2008 at the Department of Political Science of the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. He was granted academic tenure in 2011 and promoted to full professor in 2016. Gilley's research centers on comparative and international politics and public policy. His work covers issues as diverse as democracy, climate change, political legitimacy, and international conflict. He is a specialist on the politics of China and Asia. His 2006 article "The meaning and measure of state legitimacy: results for 72 countries" introduced a novel multidimensional, quantitative measure of the qualitative concept of political legitimacy.