Research Agenda

I study the comparative politics of self-determination and specialize in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Two overarching questions animate my research.

• How do nationally identifying collectives contest the meanings, practices, and institutions of self-determination within and beyond the state?

• What forms does justice take after territorial dispossession and population movement?

My current research is organized around the task of explaining diachronic (temporal) variation and coevolutionary dynamics in the strategies of national self-determination movements and the governments of host states. Three main theoretical threads run through this work:

• Conceptualization of the relationships between different types and scales of strategies pursued by the central actors in self-determination conflicts.

• Identification and classification of the different processes of strategy formation for internally differentiated, organizationally complex collective actors.

• Explanation of suboptimal strategy formation and inefficient strategic adaptation in protracted conflicts.

The empirical context for my research is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I analyze this case in comparative perspective with other self-determination conflicts.

Book Project

I am working on a book manuscript provisionally titled The Politics of Annexation in Israel: Pathways of Territorial Incorporation After State Expansion. Please contact me for more information about this project.