Undergraduate research on Liberia. Presentation followed by remarks and discussion. This video can be downloaded, but we refer you to the YouTube version for online streaming: https://youtu.be/OWNCehsxBeA
In May 1991 the allied armies of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the 27-year military regime (Dergue) in Ethiopia. During the succeeding 27 years, the EPRDF-dominated government attracted one of the highest per capita levels of external aid in the...
Nature and Civilization is a focused interpretation of Kant’s politics insofar as it bears on the distinction between nature and civilization. It seeks to answer the question, How is Kant’s distinction between nature and civilization informing his global political thought? Kant thinks that in moving from the state of nature...
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is much more politically powerful than we might expect it to be. Despite both shockingly high rates of gun violence and deep, durable public support for stricter rules on gun ownership, the NRA regularly defeats or weakens the content of gun control legislation. Its influence...
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history, has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Among international relations scholars, these instances are usually ascribed to the fact that states, like individuals, need...
What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the...
A functional democratic society rests on the premise that the mass public holds clear preferences for policies, candidates, and more. To arrive at these preferences, many citizens rely on their social identities, making political decisions based on what they see as benefitting the groups to which they belong. They may...
Abstract The relationship between truth and politics is an ancient and venerable problem in political philosophy. But just as the traditional subordination of politics to philosophy has obscured central categories and experiences of politics (like action and freedom), it has also obscured the distinctive problem of truth in politics, or...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
My dissertation examines group dynamics of minority populations during times of violent conflict. By applying a comparative analysis to case studies drawn from the conflicts in Lebanon and Syria, I shed light on how and why minority groups decide to join a conflict, stay on the sidelines, go it alone,...