The policies of secular governments in constitutionally secular countries are at times marked by the influence of religious politics. Religious politics is specifically defined here as a politics of extending the norms of religion into the public sphere through religious legislation. Thus, some governments lend the state’s coercive capacity to...
Does the Russian Federation in the Putin-Medvedev era follow a grand strategy, and if so, what does it look like, and how can we discern the making of Russian grand strategy? However, Russian grand strategy is neither formally codified nor readily accessible, and it remains opaque at best. In this...
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...