Welcome! My name is Salih, pronounced like “Sa-Lee-H.” I am a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, and an NSF-APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant as well as Harry Frank Guggenheim (HFG) Emerging Scholar fellow. Previously, I was also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship fellow, a Doctoral Research Assistant at the Varieties of Democracy Institute, University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and a Teaching Assistant and Lecturer at the Eritrea Institute of Technology and the University of Asmara in Eritrea.
At Northwestern, I have been affiliated with the Comparative Politics Workshop (as student coordinator), the Program of African Studies, and the Comparative Historical Social Sciences workshop (as student co-coordinator).
I study comparative politics, institutions, and development, with a particular focus on political change, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development in Africa in general and southern Africa in particular. My dissertation analyzes the historical origins of sharply contrasting legacies of liberation struggles in five Southern African countries (i.e., Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe) with shared historical antecedents of prolonged settler colonialism followed by violent anti-colonial revolutions in which revolutionary national liberation movements (NLMs) sought to radically transform racist, settler-dominated state and social structures in efforts to build inclusive, equitable, and democratic multiracial nations.
I previously earned an M.A. in Political Science (Great Distinction) from Osnabrück University, Germany, and a B.A. in Political Science (Distinction) from the University of Asmara in Eritrea, where I was born and raised. I have lived in several countries, across three continents, ranging from very poor and authoritarian (Eritrea) to rich social democracies (Germany and Sweden) to liberal capitalism (USA) before (and since) I moved to Chicago, a city I call home now.