Research 

Research Statement

With research interests in comparative political economy of development and conflict and a regional specialization in Northeast Africa and the Red Sea, I pursue a three-pronged research agenda that cuts across the subfields of comparative politics and international relations. While I embrace mixed-method research and collaboration, I specialize in rigorous qualitative methods, including comparative case studies, fieldwork, interviews, and archival research. I am most interest in investigating policy-relevant questions along the three tracks detailed below. My research has resulted in eight peer-reviewed papers in established interdisciplinary journals, including the Journal of Institutional Economics, Nations and Nationalism, Third World Quarterly, and Society. I have been awarded significant 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: Elite Politics, Rents, and Institutional Politics

 In this track, I engage with the role of elite bargains in political order formation and the effects of institutional rules and norms. More specifically, I have examined how governing elites use rents to bargain with contending elites, and how the institutionalization of patronage agreements shapes political order. Much of my research here involves elite interviews, archival analysis, and comparative case analysis of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Sudan. I argue that strategic elite action and the formation of rents-based networks result in diverging experiences in state-building and political development. To that end, I show how the institutionalization of elite privileges and specialization of elite roles consolidates a successful state-building project in Rwanda, whereas ethnicized rent networks and weak elite cohesion create state fragility in Ethiopia and South Sudan. I have published findings from this research in several journals, and the culmination of this research will be a book manuscript, titled Violence, Elites, and Institutions: State-building and Political Development in Africa (under contract with SUNY Press). I have also extended my investigation of elite interaction and institutional politics to study the effects of institutional discourses and norms on social and organizational behavior. In an article published in Nations and Nationalism, I illustrate how certain discursive markers, when institutionalized, can produce social affects that precipitate violence when institutional checks are lapsed. I have also used this framework to research how “DEI” as an institutional norm in American higher education shapes policymaking irrespective of organizational culture, publishing my findings in Society. Moving forward, I aim to merge this institutionalist track with the next one that engages with bottom-up development governance and foundational state concepts such as sovereignty and liberalism.

Track 2: Liberalism, State-building, and Development Governance

 This track examines sovereignty and state-building in the developing world with a focus on institutional transformation and bottom-up reconstructions of state-societal relations. I examine the foundational challenges of post-colonial states and the difficulty of ascribing the concepts of sovereignty and liberalism to these contexts. Through an article published in the Review of Austrian Economics and in a forthcoming chapter in the book volume Governing Differences, I configured classical contractarian theories toward a framework of contractualism that engages with state-building in the developing world. Contractualism envisages successful state-building through emergent institutions that codify and catalyze transactions among autonomous members of society, a process that can be facilitated through development technology. My research here draws on fieldwork and interviews from Rwanda and Ethiopia, which provide contrasting insights into the entrepreneurship and economic freedom in developing societies. I should note that I was awarded nearly $20,000 in funding for this research through the Center for Governance and Markets and the Institute for Humane Studies. The objective is to show individual economic choices interact with broader institutional constraints and technology opportunities, and how these interactions inform state-societal relations from a broadly liberal perspective. The culmination of this research will be a book titled, Economic Freedom and Self-Governance in Africa: Contracting the State (under contract with Routledge). This track also engages with how institutional design affects development governance; to that end, in the Journal of Institutional Economics, I showed that a lack of attention to peaceful intra-governmental competition and individual choice in institutional design undermines federalism’s ability to peacefully manage diversity in African states.

Track 3: External Constraints on Statecraft and State Agency in the Developing World

 In this third track, I am most interested in how external constraints from three factors, the international system, global economic structures, and regional rivalries, influence statecraft and foreign policy in the developing world. My research in this area has drawn on case studies of resource competition over the Red Sea and the Nile River in Northeast Africa. In articles published in Third World Quarterly and African Security, and the edited volume Nile Basin Politics (Edward Elgar), I illustrated why foreign policy and domestic state-building constraints are inseparable in developing countries. Using the frameworks of constructivist and subaltern realism, I explained the shifts in historical and contemporary foreign policy decisions toward the Nile and the Red Sea among regional powers Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. I showed how both domestic material and ideational constraints help inform state decisions in developing states, even under the broader constraints of anarchy. In this vein, this track combines comparative and international politics to illustrate how global political economy and state political orders intersect. Moving forward, I have two distinct future research themes planned under this track. The first uses the case study of foreign and economic relations under imperial Ethiopia to show how countries operating under severe international constraints nevertheless assume limited agency and pursue independent statecraft. Relying primarily on archival research of imperial documents at the Ethiopian Palace Archives, this project will engage deeply with the limitations of dependency and postcolonial theory in understanding state agency in the third world. Second, and along these lines, I also seek to examine how state agency in the third world is changing in response to a putative global transition toward a multipolar order, through case studies of the actions of regional organizations and regional powers outside the West.