I am a Professor and Chair in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of York, where I hold a £1.2m UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship and direct the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War established as part of this Fellowship. Previously, I was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and a Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, affiliated with the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.
My fieldwork-intensive research explores the internal dynamics of and international intervention in contemporary armed conflict, with a focus on social mobilization, ex-combatant demobilization and reintegration and civilian protection norms and practices. In 2021, I launched a 7-year UKRI FLF Civil War Paths project “Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach” that views civil war as a social process, which connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between non-state, state, civilian, and external actors involved, and studies different paths civil wars follow through coordinated fieldwork and analysis with a team of researchers.
My book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2022 APSA Charles Taylor Book Award and ASEEES Davis Center Book Prize, asks how ordinary people navigate the uncertainty of the war’s onset to arrive at different mobilization decisions. It shows that individuals come to perceive risk in different ways, affected by earlier experiences of conflict and by social networks at the time of mobilization, and act differently based on whom they understand to be threatened and mobilize to protect.
My work has been published in American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, European Journal of International Relations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs and International Peacekeeping, among other journals, and I have contributed to policy discussions of peace processes, particularly the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia, as well as acting as an expert on Interpeace’s Principles for Peace Stakeholder Platform.
I have been actively involved in the debates on transparency in Political Science and have written on transparency in sensitive qualitative research with human participants. To listen to my talk on transparency and human subjects at APSA 2017 Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Roundtable, click here.