PhD Student Research & Placement: Where Have All
the Graduates Gone?
Those below are
former graduate students for whom I served as dissertation committee chair. In
their various positions they remain part of a professional network and a
community. Their research methods range across a spectrum that includes
ethnographic narrative, interviews and participant observation, formal
modeling, field experiments, descriptive statistics, surveys, and more. All of
them seek to better understand basic problems related to violent conflicts.
Many came to academic research with prior engagement with conflicts. Some came
from NGOs, policy positions, military service in various countries, in addition
to those who come directly from other academic programs. These backgrounds
contribute to their deep knowledge of what they study. They avoid excessive
abstraction and elaborate demonstrations of the obvious or trivial. Their
research centers on topics that are significant and often of interest to an
audience that reaches far beyond the university.
2021
Nathan Dial, “The Pivotal Nation, Critical Allies,
Contributors, and Burden Sharing: An Analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization post-Cold War”
Maj Nathan Dial has
served as an officer in the United States Air Force since 2010. He is a
graduate of the Uuro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training
Course and flew EC-130Hs at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona. He is a US
Air Force Academy graduate and earned a Master’s in Public Policy from the
Harvard Kennedy School. Nate’s research
is particularly valuable for identifying multiple channels of formal and
informal cooperation among NATO members that contribute to the cohesion of the
alliance. One intriguing finding is that this socialization process leads to
greater identification of compatible, if not congruent, interests that motivate
NATO’s disparate group of members to cooperate in a selective, yet consistent
fashion. These findings enable Nate to make practical suggestions for
strengthening NATO cohesion based on a deeper understanding of this selective
approach. His dissertation committee included Hendrik Spryt
and Marina Henke
After graduation, Maj
Dial, PhD, went on to his assignment as a RC-135 Pilot, Assistant Director of
Operations 45th Reconnaissance Squadron, Offutt AFB, located in the
402 zone.
Jesse Humpal,
“Global Insurgents and
the Winning Paradox”
Maj Jesse Humpal
serves in the United States Air Force.
He came to NU from Cannon AFB near Clovis, New Mexico. Jesse’s research
focuses on issues related to contemporary modes of warfare, such as the
tactical and operational implications of fighting in urban environments and the
impacts of new communications technologies on their organizational structures
and aims. While most agree that social
media is a powerful enabler of these groups, Maj Humpal
finds that opportunities that these groups find to integrate into globalizing
economic networks enables them to operate in a de-territorialized realm in
which they are better able to weather military defeat. Coupled with messaging through social media,
these groups can be “defeated” on battlefields while continuing to survive
among networks of supporters. He then uses these findings to identify specific
operational pathways to countering the influence of these groups. His dissertation
committee included Henrik Spruyt, Marina Henke, and
David Blair (USAF).
Maj Humpal serves in
a stimulating think-tank-like organization before his (eventual) assignment to
the Department of Political Science at the US Air Force Academy. Meanwhile, he
shows how Twitter should be used.
Rana Khoury “Aid and
Activism across the Syrian Warscape” (co-Chaired with
Wendy Pearlman)
Rana Khoury
focuses on the politics of refugee mobilization in the context of wider
conflict. She is investigating patterns
of mobilization
Among refugees of the Syrian conflict and has
identified different patterns in their organization and relationships to home
communities in the course of the current conflict. Her
argument identifies drivers of major shifts in refugee mobilization in recent
years in the weakening of state authorities in the states of origin and in host
states. These changes have undermined international regimes concerning refugee
populations. Like other actors associated with contemporary conflicts, refugees
also have to adapt to new conditions. Rana already is an accomplished researcher
and is the author of As Ohio Goes: Life in the Post-Recession
Nation (Kent State
University Press, 2016). In this book, Rana tells the stories of average
Americans living in a moment of record income inequality and declining
standards of living. Rana received an
SSRC Predissertation Fellowship in 2015, and in 2016 she received an American
Center for Oriental Research pre-doctoral fellowship and a ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius field
research grant to support her dissertation research in Jordan and Turkey.
David Peyton, “Property
Security in the Midst of Insecurity: Wealth Defense, Violence and Institutional
Stasis in the Democratic Republic of Congo”
David Peyton came to
our program from Wheaton College by way of the National Defense University. He
studies relationships between business groups and municipal authorities in
eastern Congo to explain how varied social orders develop across municipalities
in this region of persistent instability and very weak formal state authority.
He found that mutual concerns to protect commercial operations and assets
represent an alternative to classical ideas about how and why state authority
becomes institutionalized. David finds that this urge to protect commercial
resources can replace external threat as a mechanism that pushes actors to
construct state-like institutions, including ones that protect and mobilize
people outside of these narrower business interests. David won a Dissertation
Proposal Development Fellowship from SSRC (2013), a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral
Dissertation Fellowship (2015-16), Boren Fellowship (2016-17), and Foreign
Language Area Studies Fellowships and his dissertation won the APSA’s
2021 Gabriel A. Almond Award
for the best dissertation in comparative politics.
After a post-doc at
the Naval Postgraduate School in 2021, David moved to the Treasury Department’s
Office of Foreign Asset Controls.
2020
Michael Povilus
“Russian Grand Strategy: Cultivating National Will and Military
Modernization”
Lt Col Mike Povilus
(United States Air Force) came to us from the School of Advanced Air and Space
Studies at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama.
He served as Chief of the Arms Control Implementation Unit at the US
Embassy in Moscow in the mid-2010s and earlier was a member of the 376th
Air Expeditionary Wing Theater Security Cooperation group in Kyrgyzstan. He holds a Master’s in East European Studies
from Freie Universität Berlin. Mike’s dissertation
research focuses on the politics of the development of 21st century
Russian strategic thought. His interests focus on challenges that
unconventional tactics in aggressive actions pose to global norms of warfare
and the broader conduct of international relations. He identifies an underlying
dynamic in which revisionist challenges build upon accepted norms with the
intent of creating a free-rider situation in which systematic norms violations
are accepted within existing practices. His interest extends to the ways that
this “hybrid warfare” vision of action fits in Russian strategic thinking that,
in many other ways, fits neatly in a historical pattern of Russian definitions
of power. Hendrik Spruyt and Marina Henke also served
on Mike’s dissertation committee.
Lt Col Povilus
commands Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, Detachment 195, is Chair of
the Department of Aerospace Studies, and Professor of Aerospace Studies at
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago IL.
2019
Sean Lee, “Minority Communities in Times of
Conflict: Civil War in Lebanon and Syria”
Sean Lee explores
the development of the “minority” political category in the region from Lebanon
to Iraq in a dissertation that is becoming a book. His committee included Wendy
Pearlman and Hendrik Spruyt. This topic is important
because (1) the “minority” category sheds light on the development of political
ideas in that part of the world from the late Ottoman period to the present,
and (2), provides a new lens for interpreting recent and current conflicts in
the region that ostensibly stress grand narratives of sectarian and ethnic
conflict. Through extensive interviews and consultation of a wide literature
through his fluency in Arabic and French (among other languages), Sean provides
a new framework for understanding the development of Pan-Arabism, nationalism,
and community identity in this important region. He holds a BA is from Mercer
University & MA from the Sorbonne & Ecole des hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
While a graduate student he received a Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Research
Grant and a US Department of State Critical Language Scholarship, US Department
of Education Title VI – Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships
and a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research award to support field research in
the Middle East. Previously he was a doctoral fellow at the Orient Institut-Beirut (2018-2019). Hendrik Spruyt
and Wendy Pearlman were members of Sean’s dissertation committee.
Sean is an Assistant Professor of Political
Science at the American University of Cairo and maintains his own web site.
Sasha Klyachkina, “Reconfiguration of Sub-National Governance: Responses
to Violence and State Collapse in the North Caucasus”
Sasha Klyachkina
researches and writes about how the organization of violence in the late 1980s
and early 1990s in the Caucasus region created new patterns of authority and
shaped the subsequent institutionalization of order. She identifies a post-conflict interaction
between the mobilization of rebels, criminal gangs, and counterinsurgency and
policing that leads to distinct patterns of local management of order. This
involves the intercession of informal practices and institutions alongside the
development of formal institutions. This tailor-made maintenance of order
adapts practices and institutions from the political center, while
simultaneously shaping them to deal with local challenges of monitoring the
activities of diverse and often insular communities and regulating behavior and
relationships that formal rules and institutions do not anticipate. Her
research in the Caucasus received support from the ZEIT-Stiftung’s Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius
fieldwork grant, as well as a Harriman Institute Research Grant to produce an
original set of surveys in Dagestan, Chechnya and
Ingushetia. Ana Arjona and Rachel Riedl
served as dissertation committee members.
Sasha was a
Postdoctoral
Fellow for 2019-2020 at the Center for Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central
Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a 2020-2021 Postdoctoral
Research Associate at University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and
Markets.
2018
Marco Bocchese, “Justice Cooperatives: Explaining
State Attitudes toward the International Criminal Court”
Marco Bocchese
proposes that context shapes whether targets of international prosecutorial
bodies will see prosecution as a threat. This perception may be based upon
prior ICC or ad hoc tribunal action, but the immediacy of other threats and the
degree of menace from powerful external state actors loom larger. This explains
why in some instances threats of prosecution just cause leaders to conclude
that there is nothing to lose in defiance while others are deterred. This boils
down to leadership perceptions about survivability and the likelihood of real
punishment for proscribed behavior. He proposes that workable deterrence
requires a credible threat, but that the target of the threats is harder to
impress when really pressed against the wall. Amnesty plays a positive role in
this kind of leader back into a context in which compliance is more thinkable
as a viable alternative. Rachel Riedl and Ana Arjona also served
on his dissertation committee.
Marco Bocchese taught
at the University of Illinois – Chicago as he darticles
and revises his book manuscript, and now is an assistant professor in Webster
College – Vienna’s international law program.
Buddhika
Jayamaha “Combatants
Inside and Out: Battlespaces in 21st Century Civil Wars”
Buddhika (Jay) Jayamaha, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne
Division, US Army, pursues research interests in the micro-politics of
conflict. He investigates the mainsprings of organizational strategies and the
behaviors of rebel groups and militias in urban environments. His research
investigates causes for variation in rebel, militia and state organization and
tactics in urban warfare. His work
begins with important insights into how groups adapt to urban conditions in
warfare, an important consideration as much of the world’s population
urbanizes. He also recognizes that the great increase in state surveillance
capacities effectively turns all of the battle-space
into an urban environment. The rural “liberated zone” option of classic 20th
century guerrillas is receding as an option. He earned his MA from Marquette
University in Milwaukee. He and I conducted collaborative field research in
Mogadishu, Baghdad and elsewhere. We
co-authored (with Kevin Petit), “Iraq’s Path to State Failure” in Small Wars
Journal. His recent work on US
strategy appears at USMA’s Modern War Institute, and co-authored “Climate
Change and Civil War Dynamics: Institutions and Conflicts in the Sahel” in Journal of Diplomacy. Andrew Roberts and Jennifer Zemke also
served on his dissertation committee. Jay was an Associate Research Scientist
at the Department of Agriculture and Life Science, UW-Madison (2018-19), where
he wrote about food security, big data, and the detection of network
disruptions. Somehow he found time to write one of the
best ground-level views of counterinsurgency in Iraq in his Nightcap
at Dawn.
Jay is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Military & Strategic Studies at the US Air
Force Academy (from 2019)
Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek,
“Pathways to Military Effectiveness: Armies and Contemporary African
States”
Prior to his graduate studies, Lt Col Jahara (Franky) Matisek was
a C17A & T-6 Instructor Pilot, with over 200 combat sorties in Iraq and
Afghanistan and deployed time as a planner at the CAOC/AMD in 2011. His
research interests focus on the impacts of new war-fighting tactics on
insurgent organizational and operational behavior, and the relationship of
military effectiveness and state power in Africa. He has written extensively
about mismatches between state and military effectiveness, and consequences for
civil-military relations and foreign assistance programs. He participated in
the University of Texas at Austin Clements Center for National Security’s 2016
Summer Seminar in History and Statecraft in Beaver Creek, Colorado. He
participated in the 2017 Summer Workshop on Analysis of Military Operations and
Strategies Workshop (SWAMOS). He also is the winner of the 2016 General Larry
D. Welch Deterrence Writing Award for his paper, “Gray
Deterrence.” One can check out his ideas in Small Wars Journal and Cicero and
more. Marina Henke and Paul Staniland
(University of Chicago) also served on his dissertation committee. He and I co-authored “A
New Era of Insurgent Recruitment: Have ‘New’ Civil Wars changed the
Dynamic?” Civil Wars, (2018) 1-21, and other articles. He is a
contributing editor at Over the Horizon: Multi-Domain Operations &
Strategies and has published in the Journal of Strategic
Studies, Defense & Security Analysis, Small Wars
Journal, Civil Wars, The Strategy Bridge, The
National Interest, and other venues on the topic of military affairs. He is
co-author (with Buddhike Jayamaha)
of Old
and New Battlespaces, a book
forced on the growing prominence of sociopolitical-information warfare from a
historical perspective.
Lt Col Matisek is an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Military & Strategic Studies at the US Air Force
Academy (since 2018) and is Senior Fellow, Homeland Defense Institute and
Director of Fellows at the Irregular Warfare Institute at West Point.
2017
Abdeta
Dribssa Beyene, “Sovereignty Preservation Attenuating It
Elsewhere: The Political and Security Dimensions of Buffer Zones”
Abdeta Beyene
writes about the political strategies that strong states adapt to manage
political instability in bordering states.
He focuses on the growing disjuncture between the political logics of
states like Ethiopia and Rwanda and their neighbors. Thus, while Ethiopia’s bureaucracies and
political establishment manage the rapid spread of infrastructure amidst
sustained high growth rates, neighboring Somalia’s and South Sudan’s
governments are unable to ensure their neighbors that they can exercise even
minimal control over the activities of people in their territories, much less
effectively govern them. Rwanda confronts a similar dilemma vis-à-vis
Congo. Focusing on the problems of
buffer zones, proxy forces and direct intervention, Abdeta
delves into general conditions of states that have to
infringe on global norms of sovereignty in the pursuit of their own engagement
as more capable actors in the global system of states. This ironic disjuncture
of rule-violating behavior in the service of rule-reinforcing developments
sheds new light on the roles of infringements on existing norms and centrality
of national power in the rise of political stability and economic success in
parts of the African continent. Abdeta and I collaborated in an American Academy of Arts
& Sciences and Stanford University Spogli Center
project on state fragility. His contribution “The Practicalities
of Living with Failed States,” appeared in Daedalus, 147:1 (2018), 128-140.
Abdeta Beyene
recently served as Chief of Staff of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation
Commission pursuant to the Agreement to Resolve the Conflict in South Sudan. He
currently serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Research in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia.
Rachel Sweet, “State-Rebel Relations during Civil War:
Institutional Change behind Frontlines”
Rachel Sweet came to
Northwestern University after living in Beni in eastern Congo, where she was a
teacher. She also conducted research in Kenya, where she observed the politics
of urban gangs and vigilante groups in Kenya.
Her current research focuses on the politics of rebel governance in
failed and weak state contexts. Her research in eastern Congo uncovers
important categories of relationships between rebel leaders, local business
groups, and most intriguingly, bureaucrats who have managed to establish
significant social bases for their authority in spite of
the recession of capital-based state authority. The establishment of wartime
and postwar institutions of governance and the nature of institutions that are
established hinge upon the configurations of these tripartite relations between
these social groups. While Congo provides her principal research site (and a
lot of variation on the dependent variable), she applies her insights to a
wider set of recent and contemporary conflict cases. Rachel won a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral
Dissertation Fellowship (2014-15) and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Dissertation Fellowship (2015-16).
Rachel Sweet holds a two year (2017-2019)
post-doc appointment at Harvard University’s Weatherhead
Center for International Affairs and will be an Assistant Professor at Notre
Dame in the fall.
2016
Moses Khisa, “The
Institutional Transformation of Africa’s Personalist Regimes: A Comparative
Analysis of Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda”
Moses Khisa comes to our group from the Centre for Basic
Research in Kampala. He holds a BA and an MA from Makerere University. He spent a year at the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences in Calcutta to study theoretical and philosophical issues in
the social sciences. In his dissertation, Moses explains the
causes of the divergent evolution of political institutions in contemporary
Africa through longitudinal and comparative analyses of Ethiopia, Ghana,
Rwanda, and Uganda. Moses argues that
there are two primary paths to institutionalizing power and authority. Moses
finds that founding leaders who emerge with broad ruling-coalitions produce
relatively stronger decision-making institutions, but the inclusiveness that is
the basis of their legitimacy erodes regime capacities to execute decisions.
Moses goes on to explain how and under what conditions regimes with narrower
coalitions are able to consolidate capacities to
execute decisions and institutionalize their authority on the basis of
performance legitimacy. His findings shed light on the emergence of liberal and
authoritarian “post-patrimonial” state-building models in Africa. His essays appear
regularly in The Observer, a
prominent Ugandan national newspaper.
Moses Khisa is an Assistant Professor
in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State
University.
Miklos
Gosztonyi “Post-Conflict
State-building in South Sudan (2005-2013): Institutional Layering, SPLM/A
Organizational Structure, and the Historicity of the South Sudanese State”
Miklos Gosztonyi
analyses the structural causes for the continuation of armed conflict through
much of the recent and more distant history of Sudan and South Sudan. He traces
how the distinctive politics geared toward the construction of elite coalitions
and the disorganization of potential challenges interacts with international
efforts to manage the exit from conflict and the construction of a viable
state. He explains how intervention that is focused at
the national level fails to account for the politics at the local level and in
the back rooms, largely beyond the official gaze of the international organizations,
foreign diplomats, and NGOs. Based in part from his experience as an employee
of the Carter Center, Miklos details how this mix of local politics and
international intervention in the post-conflict” context exacerbates political
tensions and its attendant impact on South Sudan’s citizens. Miklos
demonstrates why the deep contextual knowledge of politics in conflict
situations is so important as a precondition for theorizing about contemporary
conflict and state collapse. He has conducted his research in association with
the Centre Français des Etudes Ethiopiennes
in Addis Ababa and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales. He taught at DePaul University in
Chicago was program director for the Norwegian Refugee Council’s operations in
South Sudan and now is at l’Institut de
Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris.
2015
Valerie Freeland, “Unconventional Power:
Less Powerful States’ Strategic Use of International Norms”
Valerie Freeland asks why leaders in some
politically unstable and administratively feeble states invite foreign scrutiny
of their domestic affairs when they know that doing so risks drawing
international attention to their own unsavory practices. She focuses on why
governments that engage in human rights abuses and that tolerate corruption
would invite foreigners to investigate such practices. Through field research
in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Georgia, Valerie finds that some governments use
these invitations to create the false impression that they are interested in
conforming to international norms. Governments that engage these foreign actors
manipulate these relationships to selectively violate other norms. This shows
how selective invitations to infringe on a state’s sovereignty can be used as
tools in the hands of governments that are conventionally viewed as weak in
global terms. This work sheds light on
the true nature of the international system, particularly the extent to which
heterogeneity concealed within the practices of regimes that cause external
observers to think that they see increasing homogenization. Valerie received
support for her research from the Kellogg School of Business’s Dispute
Resolution Research Center.
Valerie Freeland was a Simons Research Fellow in Dialogue on International Law and Human
Security at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. Details can be found at
her website.
She is now works for the Province of Manitoba’s Ministry of Education.
Aditi Malik, “Playing the Communal Card:
Elites, Parties, and Inter-Ethnic Electoral Violence in Kenya and India”
Aditi Malik provides a nuanced political
explanation for variations in the occurrence of communal conflict around
elections. Through extensive field research in Kenya and India, Aditi
identifies the ethnic composition of elite coalitions and the use of patronage
networks to drive inter-ethnic wedges as key variables that determine the
probability of election-related violence and its intensity. She finds that the
nature of political patronage in Kenya differs in significant ways from that in
India, with consequences for degrees of party system institutionalization.
These factors help to explain why elites choose either to build coalitions that
unite rival communities or to divide these communities. In considering
institutional issues—such as the ways in which political parties are
organized—Aditi’s research also
considers how and when these actors exercise agency to exacerbate or mitigate
the influences of the wider political environment. This approach enables her to
show how political fractionalization is a consequence rather than a cause of
electoral violence, and identifies the conditions
under which politicians rapidly shift from factional to unitary coalition
strategies or do the reverse. Communal cleavages do a lot less of the work in
explaining violence in Aditi’s account. Party systems play a larger role, and
in this regard Aditi finds that elites in India are
far more constrained than their counterparts in Kenya in being able to change
their alliances from election to election.
Aditi Malik was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at
Pennsylvania State University’s Africana
Research Center in 2015-2016 before moving to Cal State San
Marcos in 2016, where she was an Assistant Professor.
Assistant
Professor, College of the Holy Cross (since 2017)
Maavi
Norman, “The Leadership Factor and the Quest to Reform the African State”
Maavi Norman’s research
focuses on the choices of leadership in crisis situations. Maavi
begins with the observation that some African leaders promote extensive reforms
that they know will challenge powerful entrenched interest groups and unleash a
flood of rapidly rising expectations among the wider populace. Why do these
leaders prioritize the long-term rewards of reform, even though their actions
generate these serious short-term threats to their regimes and even their own
lives? Most leaders do not take this
risk, but those that do provide clues as to how and why reforms can happen in
hostile political environments. Maavi’s field research took him to archives, private papers
and interviews in Ghana, Liberia and Senegal, where he
investigated multiple sets of successful and failed reform efforts, as well as
decisions to forego reform. In the course of his
research, Maavi systematically identified specific
elite cultural practices and outlooks that shaped how leaders evaluated the
risks and the rewards of reform. These findings provide important clues as to
better craft incentive structures that will encourage potential reformers to
prioritize long-term gains and to better manage associated short-term risks.
While a graduate student, Maavi was a Fellow at the
Center for Leadership at Northwestern University and a Gwendolyn Carter scholar
at the Program of African Studies
Maavi Norman is the
President of IRIS International Consulting (http://www.irisinternationalconsulting.com).
His firm works with businesses and non-profit organizations looking to expand
their operations into international markets.
Daniel Szarke,
“Political Reform and Challenges to Order in Weak States: Center-Periphery
Relations in the Sahel”
Lt Col Daniel Szarke’s
work is built around the puzzle of why Mali’s regime collapsed in 2012 while
Niger’s regime has succeeded in managing political challenges similar to those that beset Mali. At the outset, he finds that competitive
elections and administrative decentralization destabilize existing
patronage-based political networks in both countries. Cross-border migrations
and flows of weapons from Libya affected both countries too. He suspects that a possible cause for this
difference lies in the configuration and management of elite political networks
in each country. Niger’s leadership managed to control the rising costs of
building political coalitions that accompany the introduction of competitive
elections in some other African countries. He suspects that this political
strategy includes a more careful attention to the centralization of coercive
capabilities and different uses of foreign observation and training of security
forces.
Lt Col Szarke is a member of the Department of Foreign Languages &
International Programs at the United States Air Force Academy where he is Director
of International Programs.
2014
Elise Dufief “The
Politics of Election Monitoring in Ethiopia”
[Dual degree, Gilles Bataillon, Directeur d’Etudes, EHESS,
co-directeur]
Elise Dufief earned a
dual doctoral degree (co-tutelle) at Northwestern University and the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She examines in depth the processes of
foreign election monitoring in Ethiopia to investigate the impact of foreign
engagement in and critiques of domestic governance on the project of exporting
democratic norms and practices. In a critique of conventional approaches to
explaining the spread of competitive elections in Africa, she finds that
Ethiopian authorities used controversies arising from complaints of foreign
monitors to normalize and legitimate their own explanations of the meaning of
democratic politics. These authorities
used rhetorical means to isolate their critics and to demonstrate
simultaneously their own version of democratic credentials and to signal the
certainty of their domination. Whether
foreigners become complicity in this strategy depends upon the depth of their
engagement and how audiences interpret critiques of election processes. Through her extensive interviews of Ethiopian
officials and European Union and other election monitors, Elise provides
detailed accounts of how Ethiopian government critiques and internally
generated evaluations of monitoring performance tended to refocus attention to
observers’ deficiencies and provide material to discredit and controversialize monitoring in the eyes of observers inside
and outside of Ethiopia.
Elise Dufief was
Research Manager at Publish What You Fund in London, UK. Post-Brexit, she is now based in the French
Ministry for Foreign Affairs, where she evaluates and advises on overseas
development strategies.
Khairunnisa
Mohamedali, “Negotiating
the State: Informal and Formal State Institutions in Contemporary Uganda and
Kenya”
This dissertation shows how relationships
between state elite coalitions and business groups develop in the contexts
where the credibility of commitment generally is suspect. Through extensive
field research in Kenya and Uganda, Khairunnisa found
that state – business relations reflected the priority and strategies of risk
management. Businesses engaging with centralized and hierarchical
patronage-based elite networks solved their risk management problems through
privileging the benefits of political protection; in
essence, the creation of oligopolies in the business realm and the servicing of
patronage networks in the political realm. Businesses facing fragmented elite
coalitions have to resort to the precarious use of formal state institutions, and insist instead on the rule of law
(including more scrupulous business pursuit of formal licensing and payment of
taxes) and delivery of state promises to provide services. The implication of these findings is that
external efforts to promote commercial interests may strengthen patronage-based
political systems and entrench suboptimal investment patterns. More durable
business interest in the rule of law and capable formal institutions of the
state may require fragmented state elite networks, which the Kenya case shows
may be prone to greater risks of violent competition.
Khairunnisa Mohammedali
is Head of Insights, Europe at Ideas Couture, Inc. in their London office.
2013
Romain Malejacq,
“Neo-Chiefs in the
International State System—Power Strategies and Authority in Afghanistan (1992
to the Present)”
[Dual Degree, co-directeur, Bertrand Badie, professeur des Universités
à l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris et enseignant-chercheur associé au
Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI).]
This dissertation research focuses on the
strategies that Afghan “warlords” use to consolidate and legitimate their
authority. Romain begins by testing the assumption that post-2011
state-building in Afghanistan diminishes the authority of these actors. Through
careful field research in Afghanistan over several years, Romain discovered the
mechanisms through which these actors engage in “power conversion,” or the
redeployment of their influence in political, commercial, religious
and other social networks to maintain their authority. He finds that key
elements of state-building strategies, including a variety of counterinsurgency
efforts and numerous administrative reforms, unintentionally assisted in these
“power conversion” strategies. In sum,
he shows how pressures on actors in the global periphery to construct their
authority in conformity to a set of international standards and norms results
instead in the construction of hybrid authorities that include sub-state actors
that exercise substantial autonomous capacities to engage in their own brand of
“international” relations in their searches for resources and support.
Assistant
Professor, Radboud University & Nijmegen School of Management’s Centre
for International Conflict Analysis and Management (Netherlands) from 2013.
(Romain blogs at http://afghanopoly.wordpress.com/)
Sean Burns, “One Hand? Military Structure and Middle
East Revolts”
This research explores how regime strategies of
control over militaries prior to revolts in the Middle East shape how these
revolts evolve. In a nutshell, Sean finds that all of
these pre-conflict regimes engaged in patronage-based strategies of control.
But those that used the hierarchical structures of military commands as
vehicles for patronage left these militaries with enough institutional cohesion
such that they could act as conservative stabilizing successors to old
authoritarian regimes. This in turn left this kind of military with capacities
to manage and limit political violence and to support the cohesion of other
state institutions. Pre-conflict authoritarian regimes that sought to undermine
military cohesion through close personal ties between political leaders and
officers often sponsored non-official militias, processes that fragmented the
exercise of coercion in these societies. These revolts have experienced
prolonged political instability that has undermined other state institutions
and led to conditions that resemble so called “collapsed states” in parts of
Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. His
dissertation led to his first book, Revolts
and the Military in the Arab Spring: Popular Uprisings and the Politics of
Repressions (IB Tauris, 2017). Sean
also explores how these sobering conclusions have provided incentives to
foreign actors to support authoritarian rulers who are known to foster
conditions that in the long-term lead to a devastating fragmentation of
institutions that are essential to the maintenance of order.
Lecturer in Residence, Northwestern
University – Qatar (2011 – 2016)
Visiting
Assistant Professor, William & Mary (since 2016)
Ariel Zellman,
“Security or Identity?
Narratives of State & Nation in International Territorial Disputes”
Ariel
studies the politicization of identity in the context of irredentist claims.
Despite seemingly overwhelming incentives to avoid such claims, Ariel finds
that territorial claims on the basis of an ethnic
group’s connection to that territory at the level of national politics are
surprisingly common. Ariel’s critical observation is that territorial claims do
not spring from the instrumental designs of nationalist politicians or ethnic
extremists who outbid each other to adopt progressively more hard-line postures. Ariel grapples directly with the idea
of the “political entrepreneur” in the works of economists (such as Paul
Collier) and political scientists (such as Robert Bates, David Laitin and Jim Fearon) who focus on elite-level incentives
to explain the appearance and evolution of ethnic conflict. Ariel finds that
grassroots social movements drive persisting territorial claims, despite
substantial costs in terms of economic well-being and international standing.
Through societal interpretations of what he terms ethno-historical
evidence—archeological and other evidence of ancestral occupation of
territory—mass political movements coalesce. The instrumental politicians from
standard rational choice explanations are consequences rather than causes of
this development. These broad-based movements interpret politics in ways that
are internally consistent and are resistant to carrots and sticks that
outsiders wield. Ariel’s approach suggests that irredentist politics at a
popular level is more prevalent than one generally imagines (i.e.
expansionist Bulgarians, Bolivians who have axes to grind with Chile and so
forth). Thus Ariel views the post-1945 world’s
prohibition of conquest to only temporarily put the genie of irredentism back
in the bottle, much as the Congress of Vienna was supposed to banish
nationalism back in 1815.
Assistant Professor at Bar Ilan University, Department of Political Studies from 2015
(Ariel blogs at http://arielzellman.wordpress.com/)
2012
Kendra Koivu, “Organized Crime and the State:
State-Building, Illicit Markets and Governance Structures”
Most people assume that states and organized
crime groups (OCGs) commonly exist in opposition to one another; i.e., that
strong states and repress OCGs, and that weak sates are overrun by them. Kendra
finds instead that some strong states have strong OCGs (such as contemporary
Japan) and that some weak states coexist with weak OCGs (such as interwar
Finland). Kendra develops a transactional model to explain these and other
surprising outcomes. Kendra’s model specifies a range of relationships, from
collusion to collision between states and OCGs that arise out of state agents’
efforts to solve problems related to market regulation. Kendra discovers that
it is not unusual for some state officials to attempt to recruit OCGs to carry
out tasks commonly associated with states, particularly where this involves
efforts to restrict competition and bolster market penetration beyond a state’s
borders. More generally, Kendra explores
how a variety of strategies for state management of violent actors contributes
to state-building efforts, and shapes the long-term
relationship between state power and coercion.
Assistant
Professor, University of New Mexico from 2012
Erin Kimball Damman,
“Peacekeeping for
Approval: The Rise of African-Led Interventions”
Erin Kimball’s dissertation tackles a basic
question: What accounts for cooperation among a disparate group of African
countries to undertake armed peacekeeping operations? One would think that
widely varied capabilities, long-term fears of military involvement in domestic
politics, and regional norms against overt infringement on the sovereignty of
other African states would discourage such cooperation. Erin tests a range of explanations for this
cooperation such as the influence of new norms that encourage intervention to
prevent atrocities, shifts in regional geo-strategic balances, and hegemonic
management of cooperation under the label of US-led security strategies in
Africa. Erin finds instead that domestic political considerations drive
decisions about whether or not to participate in
peacekeeping operations. Decisions to cooperate tend to emerge out of efforts
on the part of leaders to extract more resources from powerful external patrons
that they can then use to manage members of their own coalitions. Peacekeeping
also serves as an instrument to recruit foreigners to help limit the domestic
political roles of armed forces. Erin finds that these relationships underlying
mobilization for warfare reinforce patron-client logics of domestic politics
rather than increasing the bureaucratic capacities and efficacy of governments
that participate in peacekeeping. She uses the case of Ethiopia’s intervention
in African conflicts as a counterfactual to illustrate this divergence in the
logics of decisions to use force and the divergent outcomes in these decisions’
effects.
Assistant Professor, Florida
International University from 2013
Christopher Day, “The Fates of Rebels: The Politics of
Insurgency Survival and Demise”
Before joining our program Chris Day earned his
MA in International Affairs from SAIS. Chris also worked for about nine years
with humanitarian aid organizations. This work took him to conflict zones and
put him in positions in which he had to negotiate with armed actors on the
ground in places that included Nigeria’s delta region, Sierra Leone, South
Sudan, Uganda and Kashmir. Chris’s dissertation builds on observations
from those experiences and on extensive fielded research in Sierra Leone, Uganda and South Sudan to address the question: What happens
to the great majority of rebel groups that fail to consolidate and seize state
power, and what do their fates reveal about the nature of past and contemporary
rebel warfare? Chris explains how
patron-client networks dominate the conduct of warfare in some countries. In
many instances, rebellion becomes an instrument of negotiation within an
intra-elite coalition. Political actors in neighboring states discover that
they can use patronage of rebel groups to pursue their own agendas,
illustrating further the intersections of established political networks and
violent action. Chris won an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant to
support his dissertation research. He and I coauthored “In harm's way: African
counter-insurgency and patronage politics,” Civil
Wars, 16:2 (2014), 105-126.
Associate Professor, College
of Charleston (from 2012)
2010
Natacha Lemasle,
“Political Strategies
of Local Actors in the Shadow of International Projects of Post-conflict
Reconstruction”
Natacha Lemasle
earned her degree in the joint Northwestern University – Sciences Po PhD
program, with Prof. Samy Cohen at Sciences Po serving
as a co-chair of her dissertation committee. She is concerned with how local
actors in Sierra Leone and Liberia engage with the international “post-conflict
reconstruction and democratization industry.”
She finds that local actors often hold ideas about legitimate authority
that are at odds with global liberal notions of citizenship and individual
rights. They also may hold contrary
ideas about post-conflict justice.
Nonetheless, post-conflict international engagement often requires
acceptance and application of the imported models of politics. Her research in
Sierra Leone indicates that local actors devise strategies “from below” to
modify and on occasion undermine the plans of outsiders. Understanding this
process is critical for mapping the true configuration of post-conflict political
authority in these places and identifying potential flash-points
for future conflict.
Natacha is Social Development Specialist, AFTCS
(Africa Conflict, Fragile States and Social Development) Unit, World Bank,
(since 2010), where her
work focuses on post-conflict countries in Africa, where she manages
projects supporting demobilization and reintegration of former combatants,
supports local integration of forcibly displaced populations, and the
prevention and mitigation of sexual and gender-based violence. She is the
coordinator of the World Bank Global Platform on Addressing Sexual and
Gender-Based Violence.
2009
Patrick Johnston, “Humanitarian Intervention and the Logic
of Genocide in Civil War.”
Patrick Johnston asks whether and under what
conditions state targeting of civilians is and effective strategy for defeating
rebels. He considers this question in the context of the cases of the US in the
Philippine War (1900-02), in Vietnam (the 1960s to 1973) and Sudan in Darfur
(2000s). Patrick also has constructed his own data set of significant instances
of state rebel campaigns since 1800. Combining his analysis of these cases and
his larger data set, Patrick finds that the application of force in areas where
rebels operate among non-combatants is a successful device for separating
rebels from non-combatants. Non-combatants conclude that it is in their
interests to move to safer areas under government control, or
provide information to government forces to expand such areas. Patrick’s
research shows that non-combatants do not remain static and behave according to
bounded calculations concerning which force asserts the most control at a given
moment. Governments can use this behavior to expand its areas of control in
ways that do not rely critically on “hearts and minds” campaigns to out-govern
rebel forces in contested areas. Patrick was a Peace Scholar Dissertation
Fellow at the US Institute of Peace, 2009-10.
Center for International Security and
Cooperation (CISAC) Stanford University post-doctoral fellow (2010-11).
Harvard University Belfer
Center—Post-doc (2009-11)
Political
Scientist, RAND Corporation since 2011,
He is at www.patrickjohnston.info,
and here is his great 2015 article
in Foreign Affairs.
2008
Lee Seymour, “Pathways to Secession: Mapping the
Institutional Effect of Secessionist Violence”
Lee Seymour’s dissertation explores the
“international relations” of separatist insurgencies. He shows how some
separatists successfully utilize appeals to global norms to extract resources
and diplomatic protection from more powerful international actors. They become
adept at focusing appeals to the interests and anxieties of different
constituencies to create political opportunities for themselves. Regional
configurations of power, however, exercise considerable influence over the
utility of these strategies. These strategies, coupled with shifts in global
politics, give separatists new openings to achieve their goals in recent years.
But these “gains” are contingent upon occupying a geo-strategic position that
allows separatists to exploit these opportunities, a condition that not all share. Seymour conducted field research for this project in
Somalia (Somaliland), Sudan (southern parts), Armenia (Nagorno-Karabakh), and
in Kosovo. Seymour won a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Fellowship (2003-06) United States Institute of Peace, Peace Scholar
Dissertation Fellowship (2006-07), and a Presidential Fellowship (2006-08) and
was a Guest Researcher at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Berlin).
Nice article, “Why
Factions Switch Sides in Civil Wars” in International
Security.
Harvard University Belfer
Center – Post-doc (2008-09)
Assistant Professor, University of Leiden
(2009-13)
Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam
(2014-15)
Professeur agrégé, Université de Montréal depuis 2015
2007
Claire Metelits,
“Coercion and
Collusion: Change in Rebel Group Treatment of Civilians”
This dissertation explores why some rebel
groups undertake radical shifts in their behavior toward civilians, seemingly
without regard to the resource endowments or external diplomatic norms that
they find in their external environments.
Metelits explains rebel group behavior in
terms of degrees of control over local people and resources. If rebels exercise
something close to a monopoly of control, they are more willing to engage in
“democratic openings” to local people and involve these people in their day to day decision-making processes. Where this control is
challenged, they are more likely to become more coercive toward local people.
Ironically, this means that rebels who face states that engage in their own
democratic openings are most likely to become more violent toward local people.
In short, global norms of democratic rule seem to gain the most traction among
rebels secure in their control and are most actively defied by those who are
most challenged. Rebel “state-building” is very much about control and much
less about attracting popular support in this analysis. Metelits
conducted field research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, and southern
Sudan and received support from the Dispute Resolution Research Center of the
Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern University
and other sources. Her dissertation led
to her first book, Inside Insurgency:
Violence, Civilians and Revolutionary Group Behavior (NYU Press, 2009).
Washington State University – Assistant
Professor (2007-09)
Regional Scholar for Africa at the Cultural
Knowledge Consortium from 2012-2013 (US Army TRADOC/ CGI Federal). Prior to
this, she worked as an advisor and researcher for the U.S. Africa Command in
Stuttgart and the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa in Djibouti.
Visiting Assistant Professor, Davidson College
(2013-2014)
Professorial Lecturer,
School of International Service, American University (2014-2018)
Associate Professor of Strategic Studies,
Marine Corps Command & Staff College (since 2018)
2006
Ato
Kwamena Onoma, “Rethinking the Causes of Property
Rights Regimes: Botswana, Kenya and Ghana in Comparative Perspective”
Onoma’s dissertation asks why people who own real estate
in some African countries sometimes resist reform efforts that would give them
greater legal capabilities to defend their title to this property. One would
think that all owners of real estate would prefer such reforms, since such
reforms should increase the value of properties as collateral for loans when
rights become more clearly defined and exclusive. Instead, Onoma
finds that owners of real estate in patronage-based political systems find more
value in legal uncertainty. They use their political positions to exploit
others’ uncertainties, and reap short-term gains
through their control over real estate. Onoma finds
that this kind of behavior rooted in the configurations of elite accommodations
in their higher levels of state power. He shows where legal reform of land
tenure is likely to be defied by ostensible beneficiaries and where it will be
exploited in a manner that will support the growth of predictable markets for
land and bolster credit markets. Onoma conducted about a year and a half of field research
for this project in Ghana, Botswana and Kenya and received support from the
Social Science Research Council and other sources.
Princeton University – Postdoc at Center
for Globalization and Governance
Yale University – Assistant
Professor (2007 - 2012)
Head, African Centre for Peace and Security
Training
(Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2012-13)
Program Officer, Research at Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Dakar, Senegal, since
2013)
Birol
Baskan, “Religious
Institutions and the Diverging Processes of State-Building in Turkey and Iran”
Birol Baskan’s
dissertation explores diverging historical evolutions of relations between
state institutions and religious organizations in Iran and Ottoman Turkey. Baskan traces the
merger of religious institutions with state institutions as state rulers
attempted to expand the scope of their authority from the 17th and
18th centuries to the 20th century. Baskan
identifies differences in the organizational structure of Sunni and Shia
religious organizations as key factors shaping these diverging paths of
evolution. In the case of the latter in Iran, state building projects were more
easily absorbed into the decentralized structures of Shia organizations (which
were initiated as a state project in a massive conversion of the country’s
religious establishment). Ironically, what appeared to be an easy target for
state builders from an institutional perspective in one case turned out to be
the more easily managed (from the state-builder’s perspective) while the more
centrally organized one was more easily controlled. This dissertation sheds new
light on the role of religious organizations in the state-building process, and provides a basis for a revised look at the role
of these organizations in European state building too. Fluent in Turkish and Persian, Baskan was able to conduct on-site research for this
project.
Qatar University – Assistant Professor
(2007-10)
Georgetown University, School of
Foreign Service (Qatar Campus) – Assistant Professor
(since 2010)
Roshen
Hendrickson
Roshen Hendrikson
wrote her dissertation on US foreign policy in Africa. Her work contextualized
the evolution of US foreign policy from the Cold War to the 21st
century, with a focus on the political roles of specific US government institutions
in overall policy. This dissertation informed her work as she wrote Promoting
U.S. Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2014). This book focuses specifically on US policies designed
to promote private foreign investment in Africa.
CUNY –
Staten Island – Associate Professor
2004
Christina Nyström,
“The Patrimonial Straightjacket: A Study of Namibian Liberation and Path
Dependency”
Christina Nyström’s
dissertation investigates the politics of institution-building and foreign
assistance in post-conflict Namibia. Christina conducted field research in that
country to determine the impact of efforts among domestic and foreign actors to
integrate the organizational structures and practices of the liberation
movement into day-to-day governance. Her main finding is that what seemed to be
incentives to adopt practices to strengthen formal institutions of the state
instead bolstered the personalist networks of the liberation movement. What had
been affective instruments of recruitment and control during the struggle for
independence became instruments of clientelist politics after the struggle.
This occurred in spite of the lessons that domestic
and international actors thought that they had learned from earlier
post-conflict transitions.
Head of school at Viktor
Rydberg gymnasium Odenplan (Sweden), then Chief Learning Officer
på Handelshögskolan i Stockholm / Stockholm School of Economics.
2002
Krista Johnson, “From Consensual Decision-making to
Conventional Politics: Popular Participation in Contemporary South Africa”
This dissertation examines the
institutionalization of post-apartheid governance in South Africa through the
lens of the evolution of GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution)
plan. Early optimism was replaced with
the growing influence of insider networks and waning commitment to the plan’s
initial objectives in the face of global pressures to maintain fiscal
discipline. Krista’s research was supported with an NSF Pre-Dissertation
Fellowship.
DePaul University – Assistant Professor
(2002-05)
Agnes Scott College – Assistant
Professor (from 2005)
Howard University – Department of
African Studies Associate
Professor (since 2013)