Research

My dissertation project explores the enduring impact of colonial legacies on post-colonial militaries by  examining two interconnected questions: how colonizers strategically manipulate the ethnic composition of their colonies' militaries and whether these structures were durable in post-independence states. The central argument of my dissertation challenges the notion that militaries are malleable institutions that can be reshaped to match a leader’s political incentives, asserting instead that they are significantly influenced by their colonial history.

Colonizing powers often built militaries in the territories they colonized, but when they did so, they faced a dilemma: make the military too weak and the colony is defenseless to threats, but make it too strong and the colony can rebel. Scholars have argued that, as a result, colonizers often relied on ethnic stacking (i.e., the recruitment from one religious or ethnic group and the exclusion of others) as a way to increase the size of their colonies’ militaries while avoiding unity between the military and general population. Therefore, a number of scholars have argued that the variation in ethnic stacking found in post-colonial states occurred despite a state’s colonial history (for example, Roessler 2011, Harkness 2018). However, I argue that the use of ethnic stacking varied both between colonizers and across a single colonizer’s colonies. This historic variation, I argue, resulted in the wide-ranging variation in military design we have seen in post-colonial militaries.

In particular, I argue that strategic variation in the ethnic composition of colonial militaries was shaped by two exogenous factors: competition over colonies (such as territorial disputes between colonizers) and broader conflicts, exemplified by World War II. In particular, I argue that while colonizers were incentivized to ethnically stack their colonies’ militaries at moderate levels of conflict, at the extremes colonizers were instead forced to diversify their colonial military ranks due to necessity. 

In order to test my dissertation theory, I am building an original dataset on the ethnic composition of both the officer corps and the rank-and-file across Britain’s African colonies from 1925-1945, based on three archival research trips to The National Archives in Kew, England. The dataset captures variation in British colonial military design across fifty variables, such as the number of native officers, the number of ethnic groups represented in the rank-and-file, the religious breakdown of units, and more. Importantly, the dataset captures this historical variation on a battalion or company-level scale, rather than aggregating to the state level for a given year. This interdisciplinary study draws from political science, history, sociology, and other fields to provide a comprehensive exploration of this critical aspect of post-colonial statehood.

Colonizing powers often built militaries in the states they colonized, but when they did so, they faced a dilemma: make the military too weak and the colony is defenseless, but make it too strong and the colony can rebel. As a result, colonizers often relied on ethnic stacking (or the recruitment from one religious or ethnic group and the exclusion of others) as a way to increase the size of their colonies’ militaries while avoiding unity between the military and general population. However, I argue that in actuality, reliance on ethnic stacking varied both between colonizers and across a colonizer’s colonies. I argue that varying levels of direct competition over colonies and a colony’s proximity to broader conflict led to the variation in how colonial powers designed their colonies’ militaries. I present an original dataset on the ethnic composition of African colonial militaries from 1925-1945 based on archival research.

Why do scholars study phenomena such as extreme violence, terrorism, and interstate war at much higher rates than their occurrence globally? In this paper, we examine this bias toward extreme violence within political science and shed light on the perceived institutionalized rewards that reinforce this continued fascination. This paper provides three overlapping approaches to investigate this question. First, we assess the bias toward war and violent phenomena in academic journals over time and in comparison to other pressing global issues such as climate change and gender studies using William and Mary’s TRIP dataset. Second, we analyze data from an original survey of conflict scholars we fielded in May 2024, which show a perceived bias within academic journals, grants, and even student demand for coursework toward extreme violence. Finally, we explore the impact of this bias toward extreme violence, particularly when these studies are coupled with a lack of rigorous ethical training of academics (as demonstrated by the survey data). We suggest that our discipline is potentially understudying many of the human realities of conflict (such as famine or forced migration), reifying problematic images of conflict space, and further traumatizing vulnerable populations in our fieldwork. We acknowledge that the presence of violence and war are real and that their study is valuable, but we highlight the importance of investigating why we choose certain topics and of continually reflecting on the ethics of how we study impacted populations. We offer conclusions on paths forward for academia, both in terms of ethics coursework offered in PhD programs and rethinking the purpose of our academic research.

Military effectiveness has been a cornerstone of the security studies field, yet what defining feature makes an effective military? This paper presents an analysis of over 100 military effectiveness studies from 1995 through 2020 and analyzes the trends in how successful militaries are defined and quantified. The paper highlights key divergences in the literature, from a reliance on battle wins to loss exchange ratios, and concludes with a discussion of how these different measures of military effectiveness alter our understanding of quality military design and overall success.

Working Papers