Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former Peace Fellow with the U.S. Institute of Peace. In August 2023 I will be an Assistant Professor of International Security & Law at George Mason University's Schar School for Policy and Government. I received my Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022.
My research agenda is situated at the nexus of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. It is focused on understanding conflict processes by examining the causes of, and constraints on, government policies of group-based ethnic violence and exclusion. Since these policies often create refugees, and/or affect refugees and migrants, my work bridges the fields of national and ethnic conflict regulation, and migration, refugees, and citizenship studies. I employ cross-regional comparisons of the Global South, with research and professional expertise in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. I am also interested in how the concepts we choose, and their measurements, impact our findings and have multiple projects focused on concept formation in exclusionary politics. My research is interdisciplinary, with relevance to and connections with history, law, sociology, and area studies fields. I aspire for my research to be broadly relevant to audiences across comparative politics and international relations, as well as to policy makers and practitioners.
My book project, Disorderly & Inhumane: Explaining Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion, 1900-2020, investigates why and how governments expel ethnic groups en masse. To answer these questions, I use a mix of cross-national quantitative analysis and qualitative paired-comparison case studies. Using my Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion dataset, documenting expulsions around the world from 1900-2020, I trace the evolution of mass expulsion and introduce a taxonomy of four distinct government motives to expel. The data analysis is complemented with four case studies (Ottoman Empire; Uganda/Kenya; Nigeria/South Africa; Burma) where conditions and motivations were similar, but where one government expels and the other refrains.
In addition to my academic work, I have over ten years of experience as a humanitarian and development practitioner and I continue to engage in annual consultancies (see the “humanitarian consulting” tab), most recently in Amman, Beirut, and Mosul. I consider myself a scholar of both theory and practice that asks big questions and is interested in the longue durée but is grounded in the concrete realities of the world and the utility of my research for policy makers and practitioners.
I am originally from Detroit, Michigan.
My research agenda is situated at the nexus of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. It is focused on understanding conflict processes by examining the causes of, and constraints on, government policies of group-based ethnic violence and exclusion. Since these policies often create refugees, and/or affect refugees and migrants, my work bridges the fields of national and ethnic conflict regulation, and migration, refugees, and citizenship studies. I employ cross-regional comparisons of the Global South, with research and professional expertise in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. I am also interested in how the concepts we choose, and their measurements, impact our findings and have multiple projects focused on concept formation in exclusionary politics. My research is interdisciplinary, with relevance to and connections with history, law, sociology, and area studies fields. I aspire for my research to be broadly relevant to audiences across comparative politics and international relations, as well as to policy makers and practitioners.
My book project, Disorderly & Inhumane: Explaining Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion, 1900-2020, investigates why and how governments expel ethnic groups en masse. To answer these questions, I use a mix of cross-national quantitative analysis and qualitative paired-comparison case studies. Using my Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion dataset, documenting expulsions around the world from 1900-2020, I trace the evolution of mass expulsion and introduce a taxonomy of four distinct government motives to expel. The data analysis is complemented with four case studies (Ottoman Empire; Uganda/Kenya; Nigeria/South Africa; Burma) where conditions and motivations were similar, but where one government expels and the other refrains.
In addition to my academic work, I have over ten years of experience as a humanitarian and development practitioner and I continue to engage in annual consultancies (see the “humanitarian consulting” tab), most recently in Amman, Beirut, and Mosul. I consider myself a scholar of both theory and practice that asks big questions and is interested in the longue durée but is grounded in the concrete realities of the world and the utility of my research for policy makers and practitioners.
I am originally from Detroit, Michigan.
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