This dissertation uses the case of Colombia to examine the causes and reproductive mechanisms of civil wars that last more than fifty years, which I call perpetual civil wars. It draws on network analysis of violent events and political claims, content analysis of official archival documents and historical records of...
The political history of late twentieth-century Southern Africa was dominated by violent liberation struggles against settler-colonial domination in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. All five countries experienced prolonged settler colonialism, followed by conflicts in which revolutionary national liberation movements (NLMs) sought to both end settler-colonial domination and build...
Recent experiments in participatory democracy, such as Iceland’s 2013 Constitutional Reform process to Chicago’s annual participatory budgeting process, have empowered members of the public to directly make policy decisions. These new participatory democratic institutions depend on citizens having capacity to organize new institutions and the capacity to participate in them....
Political theorists generally ascribe to the state a decisive role in the formation and protection of property rights, a view especially prevalent in the historiography of financial property in the United States. Given the capacities of government at the American Founding, however, such accounts are implausible. Drawing on writings composed...
This dissertation aims to understand how Black Chicagoans work with institutions and neighbors they distrust to pursue common policy goals – in this case, to remedy state and community violence. I introduce the theory of distrustful cooperation. Using three Chicago neighborhoods as cased studies: Greater Englewood, Bronzeville, and Calumet Heights,...
From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm cases in international law, religious passions have been cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. These assumptions sustain...
This dissertation aims to rethink how contemporary feminism might grapple with complicity, cooptation, and the concomitant failure of feminist successes through a frame other than paradox. Arguing that the paradox frame locks us into a set of “dead ends,” I shift to an orientation toward spaces between. Through sustained engagement...
Existing scholarship documents the low levels of political power held by the American poor, and concomitant economic elite domination of Congress. Since the poor seldom elect lawmakers that share their descriptive traits, they necessarily rely on non-poor lawmakers virtually representing their interests. A key part of this virtual representation is...
In this dissertation, I provide insight into different aspects of the law and politics of trade secrecy at four levels of analysis. Part I examines trade secrecy from an international and comparative perspective. It encompasses Chapters 2 and 3 and focuses on (#1) international law and (#2) comparative national policy....
“(Being a) Feminist (is a) Struggle: Intersectional Feminist Politics in the Era of the Women’s March” argues that contemporary feminist politics are characterized by debates and contestations concerning the political demands of intersectionality. Contemporary feminist theory and politics are particularly and peculiarly preoccupied with making these judgements about the political...
Regardless of where refugees are hosted, they require political knowledge of rights, restrictions, responsibilities, and the governance actors and processes who decide and uphold these. This knowledge enables refugees to comply with national laws, benefit from rights and protections, avoid rights-based exploitations and harms, and pursue life with dignity in...
In a wide range of political systems, political parties and politicians deliver special favors and material benefits to their constituents as a means of mobilizing their support during elections. This phenomenon, called patronage politics, is the focus of this dissertation. Although existing research has uncovered important variations in the patterns...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial... and An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
This dissertation interrogates the quality of sincerity as it appears throughout John Locke’s work on religious toleration and Christian theology. Sincerity, and the framework it provides, offers a means to draw together his political and theological works, as well as to appreciate both his radical potentialities and conservative impulses. The...
This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle’s and Marx’s overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That...
The textbook proceeds with an introduction to theory and concept building, moves to an explanation of causal inference (how do we 'know' whether something is causal?), and then provides a quick introduction to data and hypothesis testing. Following that, each chapter is devoted to a particular research method used within...
This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his...
Popular and scholarly arguments state that uncivil discourse is bad for democracy because it hampers political trust and sharpens polarization. These same scholars see uncivil discourse as contrary to a good democratic society. However, their arguments could be overstated because incivility may be so contextual that elites can frame certain...
How do ever-changing international systems and rapidly emerging technology shape counter-systemic revolutionary insurgent (CSRI) behavior and outcomes? The purpose of this publication is to identify causes and develop a conceptual typology of CSRI survival and behavior in a Post-9/11 era. I argue three global shocks acted as junctures for new...