Research
My current work addresses two related questions:
First, how do global discourses, institutions, and practices diffuse to national and local contexts?
Second, how do peacebuilding and social reconstruction processes occur after war, violence, and human rights abuses?
First, how do global discourses, institutions, and practices diffuse to national and local contexts?
- Human Rights Organizations Project
- Global abortion policy diffusion
- Local transitional justice mechanisms
- The International Criminal Court
Second, how do peacebuilding and social reconstruction processes occur after war, violence, and human rights abuses?
- After Atrocity: Community Reconstruction in Northern Uganda: This book manuscript builds on my dissertation project and focuses on how survivors of severe and protracted conflict rebuild their communities after violence subsides. I conducted participant-observation and 90 in-depth interviews in three post-war villages in northern Uganda. Residents of these communities just recently moved home after two decades of war and widespread forced displacement. My data explore what strategies people use to deal with the past and to reestablish social solidarity and their sense of community with their neighbors. My analysis is based in the socio-legal field of transitional justice, but adds analysis of everyday social interactions and cultural practices among resettled survivors.
- Everyday Peace Indicators
- Land conflict in Africa
- Somali refugee entrepreneurs in Minnesota