Research Agenda:
While shifting global relations are often studied through great power politics or debates around the future of the liberal international order, my research turns from examining superpowers to exploring governance and order through the experience of so-called ‘weak’ postcolonial states. In particular, my research explores why inequitable power dynamics between the ‘West and the Rest’ persist with such durability in international relations and to ask how these states – and their populations – challenge this order. To answer these questions, I turn to African states as a policy-relevant, generative site for theorizing world politics and use interpretive methods at different levels of analysis to ultimately argue that economic and racial structures reproduce international inequality but that individuals imagine worlds of non-domination and take action to secure these new worlds.
A unique empirical contribution of my work is theorizing international relations through methods at both the macro and micro levels, especially using fieldwork and original qualitative data collection to contribute a bottom-up perspective to global politics. My approach locates power with the state, but also with the bureaucratic actors who design and implement global governance initiatives and the everyday citizens who constitute and materialize the international community. At different points, I rely on treaties, memorandums, and reports from global governance initiatives, interviews with practitioners of global governance, and original data collection in South Africa and Kenya. The latter included site visits and key stakeholder interviews in South Africa as well as focus groups and interviews conducted with 74 Kenyan participants.
Publications and Working Papers
My current book project examines why humanitarian and human rights initiatives to prevent violence and spur economic development in postcolonial states largely reproduce unequal power dynamics in global governance despite well-intentioned aims. This project builds on some of my published work in the European Journal of International Relations, which argues that the human rights initiative to prevent diamond violence in Africa emphasized the market-disruptive violence of civil war while profitable racialized violence in production was left to continue.
My other work explores avenues for postcolonial contestation within an inequitable international order. In one piece, I use original qualitative evidence from Kenya to show how African citizens engage with international order through imagination and political action outside traditional governance networks – arguing, in line with James Scott, that everyday engagement in the international order may be marginal, but it is not trivial. I consider the imaginaries of citizens that underlie their demands for reform as part of a particular way of thinking about international order that has been the subject of renewed interest in political science, i.e. as worldmaking. In another piece, I examine the role of the East African community as both complying with and contesting the liberal international order.
Research Support & Awards:
My research has been supported by the RISC-RISE Consortium as well as by numerous awards from Ohio State, including the Presidential Fellowship, Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship, Department of Political Science Grants, and the International Research and Scholarship Grant, among others.
My work has also received awards from the Department of Political Science at Ohio State and the APSA International Relations Theory Section.