Democratization

Despite widespread depiction of civil war as a pathway to autocracy or state failure, the empirical record shows significant variation in post-civil war states’ regime trajectories. While some states settled into durable authoritarianism, others went on to enter the ranks of ele…

In the Kei islands, adat (custom or tradition) and social hierarchy are inextricably intertwined. This dissertation highlights the entanglements of rank and adat through an analysis of the mobilization of “tradition” by the Kei elite during both the New Order and post-Suharto pe…

This dissertation explores the causes and consequences of authoritarian elections. When holding an election, the authoritarian leader faces a dilemma: In order to maintain his rule, he needs to win big in elections. Yet, the manipulation of election results risks losing some of …

This dissertation examines the constitution of some of the local political voices that emerged in the decade after Indonesia's democratizing and decentralizing reforms. Since the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian "New Order" regime (1965-1998), the Indonesian state has been ra…

Military coups have posed a persistent threat to political stability in Africa—undermining democratization efforts, initiating lasting cycles of intra-military violence, and even descending into civil war. Since decolonization, over 200 coup attempts have been made across the co…

This project examines variation in ethnic minority mobilizations for cultural rights and asks: how, why, and under what conditions do violence-affected ethnic minority communities mobilize for increased cultural rights? Related to this, how do memories of violence interact with …

Why are authoritarian breakdowns often fraught with communal violence? The literatures on authoritarian breakdowns, democratization, and ethnic conflict include theories that can explain either the temporal or spatial variation of communal violence but not both. A more compellin…

Capable and accountable public authority has proven elusive throughout the developing world, but not entirely unattainable. Southeast Asia exhibits as much if not more cross-case variation than any other region in terms of both state capacity and levels of democratic accountabil…

This study investigated how Somalis and, in some cases, external interveners, have negotiated the convergences and divergences between Somali and imported understandings of governance and conflict resolution, and their accompanying structures, and processes, in the lands of the …

How does religion affect the transition to, and survival of democracy? Both scholars and policymakers have argued that the spread of democracy may be limited by cultural constraints imposed by certain religious traditions. In this study, I challenge the conventional wisdom and p…

In their book Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder contend that incompletely democratizing states are more prone to initiate wars than either consolidated autocratic or democratic regimes. This is because elites in democratizing…

Governance is a common problem in African countries wherein it manifests itself in various phenomena, such as authoritarian rules, conflict, civil wars, poverty, and unemployment. The research studied to tackle this problem addressed issues on the central governmental level in t…

Hassan II ruled as the highly-centralized king of Morocco from 1961 through 1999, one of the longest uninterrupted reigns in late twentieth-century history. Unlike most other Arab kings who survived the sociopolitical pressures encapsulated by Samuel Huntington as "the king's di…

Non-governmental Organizations have received much attention in recent years as their popularity continues to thrive as a vehicle to foster democratization. Theories of democracy continue to attempt to explain why democracy does and does not germinate in some countries. And most …

This research concerns the massive and protracted series of protest events that took place in Indonesia in 1997 and 1998. Triggered by a deep economic crisis, these protest events transformed Indonesia into the third largest democratic country in the world. The purposes of the r…

This study analyzes the experiences of liberalization in Egypt and Jordan as well as democratization in Yemen. The initiation and the reverse of these processes are explained by focusing on the role of the ruling elites in the three countries and the choices they made at differe…

This research examined the press and communication technology's role in political transitions, particularly democratization, in Nigeria in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Nigeria like several Asian, African, Eastern European and Latin American countries underwent transition programs to…

What shapes the dynamics of the revitalization of political participation after the collapse of a long-term authoritarian regime? While much attention has been paid to Communist successor parties in the post-Soviet space, a surprising lack of attention has been given to oppositi…

My dissertation asks why ethnic riots occur where they do in the context of a country's transition to democracy. Although examinations on causes of ethnic riots abound, most existing works have accounted for variations across countries, focused on developed democracies, and fail…

The Internet and social media have become a pervasive part of our global environment over the last few decades, utilized primarily for commerce, communication, and entertainment. The last several years, however, have seen an increase in the application of social media in politic…