Skip to main content

Research

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind” — Marston Bates

My research is organized around three interdisciplinary research programs. The first, centered on my dissertation analyzing the legacies of anticolonial liberation struggles in Southern Africa, deals with historical democratization and political development in Africa. The second agenda studies colonialism and long-run development with ongoing projects on (1) Italian colonialism and its development legacies in East and North Africa, (2) settler institutions in colonial Africa and their long-term implications for state capacity, democracy, and public good provision, and (3) colonial “indirect rule” and causal analysis. The third research program is concerned with historical institutionalism and politics in Africa, with the first paper set out to reconceptualize the role of informal institutions in governance, democracy, and development in the region.

My research has been supported by competitive grants and fellowships from The Graduate School, the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, and, outside of Northwestern, by an NSF-APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, DDRIG (2022), a Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award (2022), the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2019), and a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Pre-Dissertation Fellowship (2018).

Dissertation Project: The Legacies of Liberation in Southern Africa

My dissertation analyzes the historical causes of varied political legacies of national liberation struggles against settler-colonial rule in Southern Africa. It offers a comparative-historical explanation of political change since settler-colonial domination in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe — five Southern African countries with shared histories of prolonged settler colonialism and/or white minority domination in the twentieth century. In each case, vehement opposition to black majority rule by racialist settler-colonial regimes provoked, in the second-half of the century, revolutionary national movements that commonly sought to end racial oppression, exploitation, and exclusion of non-white majorities and to build non-racialist, inclusive, more equitable democratic societies.

In all five countries, the politico-military struggles successfully ended settler-colonial domination in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and the revolutionary parties have since dominated the national political arena. However, since national liberation (or the end of settler-colonial rule), the countries have experienced markedly divergent paths of political change. These have, in recent decades, crystalized into three sharply contrasting national political regimes defined by varied patterns of democratic inclusion, social inequalities, and national cleavages: inclusive semi-democracies with less unequal and less polarized post-racial societies (Angola and Mozambique), a militarized semi-authoritarianism with a society moderately polarized by post-racial conflicts (Zimbabwe), and inclusive multiracial democracies with highly unequal societies polarized by racial and post-racial social cleavages (South Africa and Namibia). What caused, I ask, these sharply contrasting legacies of liberation in post-settler colonial Southern Africa?

Dominant explanations focus either on historically distant, deterministic structures from the settler-colonial period, on political actors and ideologies of the anticolonialist politico-military mobilizations, or on temporally recent political events and dynamics. I offer a novel comparative-historical explanation that bridges the theoretical dilemma between structure and agency as well as between “infinite regress” to more remote historical antecedents and leapfrogging to more proximate political factors. By developing a critical junctures framework of analysis, I closely examine what I define as the “liberation episode” at the end of settler-colonial rule to hypothesize that the varied legacies of liberation in the region are outcomes of different reform approaches that defined this formative episode in each country. Depending on the specific set of opportunities and constraints they faced during the liberation reform period, Southern African liberation leaders implemented three different reform packages — i.e., radical reforms (Angola and Mozambique), liberal reforms (South Africa and Namibia), and stalled-liberal reforms (Zimbabwe) — marked by state reforms, income and land redistribution, and nation-building strategies that widely varied in speed and scope, ranging from the most rapid and comprehensive in the radical approach to the most gradual and tentative with the liberal approach to post-liberation political, institutional, and socioeconomic changes. The rather contingent policy choices of the liberation episode, I further argue, produced distinct state, social, and national-conflict structures that, in turn, set into motion divergent, path-dependent processes of political change in Southern Africa.

Refereed Journal Publications
  • “Third Wave Democratization in Africa: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy in Comparative Perspective,” CEU Political Science Journal, 10 (2016): 51-83.
  • “From SAPs to PRSPs: The Annals of Neoliberal Ideological Dogmatism in Governance & Development Policy,” Critique (Fall 2015): 67-104.
  • “Eritrea’s Foreign Policy Explained in Light of the ‘Democratic Peace’ Proposition,” International Journal of Peace & Development Studies, 4(2013): 76-89
Book Chapters
  • “Theory,” in Jean Clipperton, ed., Empirical Methods in Political Science: An Introduction (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2020).
  • “Community Organizing to End Displacement in Eritrea: A Narrative of Community and Institutional Resilience,” with A. Almedom and A. Nayr, in Wade Rathke, ed., Global Grassroots: An Organizing Perspective (New Orleans: Social Policy Press, 2011): 81-91.
Book Reviews
  • “Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform by Nic Cheeseman,” The Journal of Politics, 80 (2018): 19-20.
  • “Democratic Trajectories in Africa: Unravelling the Impact of Foreign Aid by D. Resnick and N. van de Walle,” African Affairs, 114 (2015): 663-665.
  • “The African Garrison State: Human Rights and Political Development in Eritrea, by K. Tronvoll & D. R. Mekonnen, & Eritrea at a Crossroads: A Narrative of Triumph, Betrayal and Hope, by A. W. Giorgis,” Africa Spectrum, 1 (2015): 99-103.
  • “The African Garrison State: Human Rights and Political Development in Eritrea, by K. Tronvoll & D. R. Mekonnen,” African Studies Quarterly, 15 (2014): 136-138.
Working Papers & Work In Progress
  • “Late Colonialism, Critical Junctures, and Long-Run Development in Former Italian Africa,” under review.
  • “The Political Economy of Settler States in Africa,” with Alex Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto), in preparation for submission.
  • “The Colonial Origins of Political (Under-)Development: A Comparative-Historical Analysis of Italian Africa,” working paper.
  • “Colonial ‘Indirect Rule’ and Long-Run Development in Africa: Concept Precision for Valid Causal Inference,” work in progress.
  • “Informal Institutions and African Politics: A Research Agenda,” with Lauren M. MacLean (Indiana University, Bloomington), work in progress.
  • “New Insights and Strategies in Small-N Comparison,” work in progress.
Other Publications
  • “Colonialism, Marginality, and Path Dependence in Cabo Delgado,” Clio Newsletter of Politics & History (APSA), 30 (2), 2021.
  • “Free Access to Information and a Vibrant Civil Society as Cornerstones for Sustainable Development” (with Frida Andersson). Report prepared for the EU Commission, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, 2016.
Public Writing (select)
  • “Eritrea: Why Change Abroad Doesn’t Mean Change at Home,” African Arguments, Sep. 12, 2018.
  • “Exile and Exodus from Eritrea: A Personal Testimony and Reflections on Political Repression,” Awate, August 29, 2014.
  • “How Can Lasting Peace Between Eritrea and Ethiopia be Achieved?” Think Africa Press, April 9, 2013.