Overview
My research examines the imposition of state power over populations or aspects of their lives previously outside government control. I am currently pursuing this program through research projects on projection of state power in political peripheries and on government digital surveillance.
The geographic focus of my research to date has been on Sub-Saharan Africa. Methodologically, I am interested in identification of the causal mechanisms and microfoundations of political phenomena and I use a variety of tools for this purpose: elite interviews, experiments, surveys, and systematic reviews.
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Projection of state power
The first of my two major projects examines why, how, and with what consequences states project power in political peripheries. My book manuscript and several journal articles, both published and in submission, address different aspects of extension of state power in such areas.
In the book manuscript, I investigate why some states seeking to increase their capacity to govern political peripheries rely on repression, while others provide such areas’ populations with public goods and services. I argue that the form of extension of state power depends on national and local political leaders’ vulnerability to societal pressure and on the balance of power between the two elite categories. To test the theory that I advance in the manuscript, I take advantage of a natural experiment in the historically neglected dryland border region of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. I use elite interviews, conjoint experiments, and a survey to examine the rapid extension of state power in the drylands in the last two decades and explain the substantial cross- and sub-national variation in the strategies adopted by the three countries’ governments. I find that public goods provision increases with elite vulnerability to societal pressure and with local leaders’ political influence.
Articles in Africa Spectrum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Third World Quarterly examine the relationship between elite enrichment and investments in state capacity, political mobilization of ethnic identities of hierarchically layered ethnic groups, and subordinate political elites’ role in the incorporation of political peripheries, respectively. A manuscript currently under review explains local government capacity and performance.
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Government digital surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa
In the second project, I continue to investigate government efforts to establish control over society but shift the focus from geographic peripheries of state power to the technological frontier. The project provides systematic evidence of government digital surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa and explains the adoption of the technologies that make surveillance possible. Its first major component involves analysis of an original dataset that contains all instances of government digital surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa undertaken for political purposes catalogued in online archival repositories. In the second part of the project, I complement the dataset with field research intended to provide more granular detail on the causes of the adoption of digital surveillance techniques, the lived experiences of surveilled individuals and groups, and the effects that digital surveillance has had on their political behavior.
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Other projects
I am also involved in a few other research projects, undertaken mostly in collaboration with colleagues. My research on collective identities and cleavages has resulted, to date, in a co-authored article in Regional and Federal Studies, which investigates the effects of regional and linguistic cleavages on redistributive preferences, as well as the aforementioned article on political mobilization of layered ethnic identities.
My interest in the drylands and the pastoralist societies that inhabit the region also extends beyond research on projection of state power. In a peer-reviewed evidence synthesis published by Oxfam Great Britain, my colleagues and I investigate the impacts of food assistance on pastoralist populations and their livelihoods.
Before I began my Ph.D., I worked for BRAC and the International Organization for Migration in Karamoja (in northeastern Uganda). During that time, I wrote reports on the the transformation of the Karimojong customary governance system, perceptions of poverty in the region, income-generating activities of adolescent and young adult women, the causes of child migration from Karamoja, and the reintegration and resettlement experiences of former child migrants.
Copies of my publications can be found here.