Research 

Research Statement

My research interests are in the comparative political economy of development and conflict, with a regional specialization in Northeast Africa and the Red Sea. I have a two-pronged research agenda that brings together aspects of comparative politics and international relations. While I support mixed-methods research and collaborative projects, my specialty is the use of rigorous qualitative methods, including comparative case studies, fieldwork, interviews, and archival research. My research has appeared in eight peer-reviewed publications in top interdisciplinary journals, including the Journal of Institutional Economics, Nations and Nationalism, Third World Quarterly, and Society. I have won competitive research funding through external grants and am currently completing two book manuscripts: Violence, Elites, and Institutions (under contract with SUNY Press) and Economic Freedom and Self-Governance in Africa (under contract with Routledge).

Track 1: State-building and Development

In the first track, I examine two dynamics in African states that produce variations in state-building and development: how elite politics and institutional design configure political order, and how economic governance structures state-society relations. My work on elite politics demonstrates how rents, patronage, and institutional norms produce different political trajectories in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Sudan. I argue that whereas Rwanda consolidated state-building via institutionalized elite privileges and role specialization, ethnicized rent networks and low elite cohesion destabilized political order in Ethiopia and South Sudan. This research constitutes the foundation of my book manuscript Violence, Elites, and Institutions: State-Building and Political Development in Africa (under contract with SUNY Press). In related work, published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, I demonstrate how federal institutional design often fails to secure peaceful intra-governmental competition and the right of exit, weakening federal arrangements in Africa. 

The second dynamic I investigate is how economic governance affects state-societal relations and state sovereignty in the African context.  Drawing on the liberal contractarian tradition, my fieldwork and interviews in Rwanda and Ethiopia provide contrasting insights into the state’s role in facilitating social-economic transactions and technological integration. This research, supported by $20,000 in external grants from the Center for Governance and Markets and the Institute for Humane Studies, culminates in my second book project, Economic Freedom and Self-Governance in Africa: Contracting the State (under contract with Routledge). I aim to continue analyzing my field notes and disseminating findings under this track as I work on the two book manuscripts.

Track 2: State Agency and External Constraints

My second track analyzes how African states utilize foreign policy to assume agency amidst a variety of external constraints, particularly, regional rivalries and international economic structures. The regional focus of this work is the Nile Basin and the Red Sea, areas that have historically fomented contention. This research places domestic state-building within international and regional contexts, demonstrating how foreign policy and domestic political order are impossible to disentangle. In Third World Quarterly, African Security, and the edited volume Nile Basin Politics (Edward Elgar), I showed how competition over resources and regional rivalries between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia influence both domestic statecraft and foreign policy. Specifically, I examine material and ideational variables that influence divergent foreign policy orientations toward shared resources. Moving forward, I plan to use archival data and elite interviews to examine African states in both historical and present times have leveraged foreign economic relations to assume agency under severe constraints, and also discuss the implications of the emerging multipolar order on African statecraft. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the limitations of approaches that diminish state agency in post-colonial literature, while also providing a policy-relevant insights into external constraints that African states continue to face. Essentially, this track combines approaches from comparative politics and international relations to illustrate how international political economy and state political orders intersect in the African context.