Publications
"Strategies of Repression: Judicial and Extrajudicial Methods of Autocratic Survival." 2018. World Politics. [DATA]
Strategies of repression vary widely between extrajudicial and judicial extremes, from unrestrained acts of violence to highly routinized legal procedures. While the former have received a great deal of scholarly attention, judicial methods remain relatively understudied. When and why do rulers repress their rivals in court? The author argues that autocrats use a judicial strategy of repression when confronting challengers from within the ruling elite. Unlike regime outsiders, who pose a common, external threat to mobilize against, insiders present a more divisive target. When autocrats confront the latter, a judicial strategy legitimizes punishment, deters future rivals, and generates shared beliefs regarding incumbent strength and challenger weakness. Using original data on political prisoners in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, the author finds that autocrats were significantly more likely to use a judicial strategy against insiders and an extrajudicial strategy against outsiders. A case study of Kenya traces the logic of the theory, showing how intraregime conflict made courts a valuable instrument of state repression. The findings demonstrate how courts can play a central role in autocratic survival.
"Strategies of Repression: Judicial and Extrajudicial Methods of Autocratic Survival." 2018. World Politics. [DATA]
Strategies of repression vary widely between extrajudicial and judicial extremes, from unrestrained acts of violence to highly routinized legal procedures. While the former have received a great deal of scholarly attention, judicial methods remain relatively understudied. When and why do rulers repress their rivals in court? The author argues that autocrats use a judicial strategy of repression when confronting challengers from within the ruling elite. Unlike regime outsiders, who pose a common, external threat to mobilize against, insiders present a more divisive target. When autocrats confront the latter, a judicial strategy legitimizes punishment, deters future rivals, and generates shared beliefs regarding incumbent strength and challenger weakness. Using original data on political prisoners in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, the author finds that autocrats were significantly more likely to use a judicial strategy against insiders and an extrajudicial strategy against outsiders. A case study of Kenya traces the logic of the theory, showing how intraregime conflict made courts a valuable instrument of state repression. The findings demonstrate how courts can play a central role in autocratic survival.
Book Project
My book project, Political Justice and Autocratic Survival in Africa, explores how autocrats repress threats to power without resorting to arbitrary violence. Political scientists have long associated authoritarian rule with acts of extrajudicial repression. Yet, while dictators have routinely weaponized courts to manage political conflict and silence democratic dissent the judiciary is an oft-overlooked institution of autocratic survival. Focusing on these themes in the context of Africa, I investigate why autocrats prefer to selectively target regime insiders for legal prosecution and the ramifications of this strategy on autocratic survival. I argue that the ritual of a judicial process helps simplify the messy reality of political conflict into more manageable terms. When power is violently contested, judicial procedures can be used to discredit political rivals and reinforce central control. By prosecuting rivals in court and in the language of the law, autocrats portray their adversaries as criminals with illegitimate claims to power. I argue that the routinized process of a trial provides a way to publicly disseminate this narrative and discourage others from challenging power in future.
My research draws on archival work in the United Kingdom and Malawi, cross-national data on political prisoners in postcolonial Africa, interviews with supreme court justices and legal experts, a comparative analysis of Kenya and Malawi, and a digital corpus of web-scraped media. My analysis shows that insiders are significantly more likely than outsiders to be taken to court for crimes against the state. A deeper examination of the Kenyan case fleshes out the mechanisms behind this trend: trials of regime insiders helped delegitimize dissent and solidify support for the central government. A judicial process can thus be used to maintain autocratic survival in the wake of intra-regime conflict.
These findings contribute to a growing body of scholarship that examines how seemingly democratic institutions can be weaponized for autocratic ends. While existing research in comparative politics has focused on the legislative, bureaucratic, and coercive tools used to consolidate arbitrary power, judicial institutions remain comparatively understudied. In fact, courts are rarely characterized as explicit instruments of state violence and are more often portrayed as institutional safeguards against dictatorship. By contrast, a growing scholarship on authoritarian judiciaries has shown that courts can address key pathologies of arbitrary rule, but these findings remain largely disconnected from the broader literature on authoritarian institutions. My book bridges this gap by examining when and why authoritarian regimes weaponize courts to maintain their survival. By focusing on the repressive function of courts, I challenge prevailing wisdom that judicial processes are inherently designed to produce more equitable outcomes. I show instead that courts can be instrumentalized for explicitly authoritarian objectives, to not only reinforce central control but also legitimize violent oppression.
My book project, Political Justice and Autocratic Survival in Africa, explores how autocrats repress threats to power without resorting to arbitrary violence. Political scientists have long associated authoritarian rule with acts of extrajudicial repression. Yet, while dictators have routinely weaponized courts to manage political conflict and silence democratic dissent the judiciary is an oft-overlooked institution of autocratic survival. Focusing on these themes in the context of Africa, I investigate why autocrats prefer to selectively target regime insiders for legal prosecution and the ramifications of this strategy on autocratic survival. I argue that the ritual of a judicial process helps simplify the messy reality of political conflict into more manageable terms. When power is violently contested, judicial procedures can be used to discredit political rivals and reinforce central control. By prosecuting rivals in court and in the language of the law, autocrats portray their adversaries as criminals with illegitimate claims to power. I argue that the routinized process of a trial provides a way to publicly disseminate this narrative and discourage others from challenging power in future.
My research draws on archival work in the United Kingdom and Malawi, cross-national data on political prisoners in postcolonial Africa, interviews with supreme court justices and legal experts, a comparative analysis of Kenya and Malawi, and a digital corpus of web-scraped media. My analysis shows that insiders are significantly more likely than outsiders to be taken to court for crimes against the state. A deeper examination of the Kenyan case fleshes out the mechanisms behind this trend: trials of regime insiders helped delegitimize dissent and solidify support for the central government. A judicial process can thus be used to maintain autocratic survival in the wake of intra-regime conflict.
These findings contribute to a growing body of scholarship that examines how seemingly democratic institutions can be weaponized for autocratic ends. While existing research in comparative politics has focused on the legislative, bureaucratic, and coercive tools used to consolidate arbitrary power, judicial institutions remain comparatively understudied. In fact, courts are rarely characterized as explicit instruments of state violence and are more often portrayed as institutional safeguards against dictatorship. By contrast, a growing scholarship on authoritarian judiciaries has shown that courts can address key pathologies of arbitrary rule, but these findings remain largely disconnected from the broader literature on authoritarian institutions. My book bridges this gap by examining when and why authoritarian regimes weaponize courts to maintain their survival. By focusing on the repressive function of courts, I challenge prevailing wisdom that judicial processes are inherently designed to produce more equitable outcomes. I show instead that courts can be instrumentalized for explicitly authoritarian objectives, to not only reinforce central control but also legitimize violent oppression.
Working Papers
"Authoritarian Legacies in Post-Authoritarian Courts: Evaluating Judicial Performance in Developing Contexts"
Courts in developing countries often fail to live up to democratic ideals. This is not merely a problem of limited resources, financing, or mismanagement. Rather, in many cases these institutions were specifically designed to entrench authoritarian power and have continued to operate according to their original purpose. But if rule of law was never the intended goal in these contexts, how should judicial performance be evaluated? What alternatives to democratic criteria can be used to evaluate authoritarian courts? Existing concepts emphasize democratic notions of law and justice and are typically measured by formal provisions (e.g. constitutions or laws) or opinion data (elite and household surveys). In this paper, I propose focusing on dimensions of judicial performance that are rooted in the authoritarian experience: specifically the scope of judicial authority. Scope refers to a court’s sphere of action, both its jurisdiction in law and its workload in practice. I argue that by focusing on matters of scope, we gain greater insight into how courts actually spend their time and their role in regulating political affairs. I consider different approaches for measuring this dimension of judicial authority, including constitutional provisions and the media.
“Combating Corruption in African Countries: Foreign Creditors and Domestic Institutions” with Leonardo Arriola (UC, Berkeley)
Although many governments have adopted measures to investigate and prosecute malfeasance by public officials, there remains considerable cross-national variation in institutional responses to high-level corruption. Under what conditions have governments established anti-corruption agencies? What impact have such agencies had on the prevalence of corruption? In addressing such questions, we argue that the origin of anti-corruption agencies ultimately undermined their purpose in African countries. Because governments established agencies to address the concerns of foreign creditors, principally multilateral institutions and Western donors, these agencies have been largely detached from domestic constituencies that might have otherwise demanded results. Moreover, since anti-corruption agencies are tangential to the primary interests of multilateral institutions, they have had little incentive to consistently ensure that agencies fulfill their mandates in practice. We assess these claims by analyzing original cross-national time-series data. Our findings show that anti-corruption agencies were established more rapidly in countries with greater debt service obligations, regardless of domestic political or economic conditions. We further show that anti-corruption agencies have had a negative effect on corruption: perceived levels have grown faster in countries that established agencies early on to satisfy foreign creditors.
"Regional Responses to Human Rights Violations" with Leonardo Arriola (UC, Berkeley) and David Dow (Duke)
Do regional human rights frameworks make African states more or less responsive to human rights violations in member countries? In partnership with Amnesty International, we examined the extent to which African regional institutions, anchored by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), have responded to human rights violations in conflict-afflicted countries across the continent. Using natural language processing techniques on a web-scraped corpus of official documents issued by the PSC and ACHPR describing the output of their meetings and summarizing their main platforms and agendas, we analyzed whether the PSC and ACHPR have fulfilled their institutional mandates to actively protect and intervene on behalf of human rights, or have instead espousing empty rhetoric. Our preliminary findings were included in the 2017 Amnesty International Report, "Africa: Counting Gains, Filling Gaps: Strengthening African Union’s Response to Human Rights Violations Committed in Conflict Situations."
"Authoritarian Legacies in Post-Authoritarian Courts: Evaluating Judicial Performance in Developing Contexts"
Courts in developing countries often fail to live up to democratic ideals. This is not merely a problem of limited resources, financing, or mismanagement. Rather, in many cases these institutions were specifically designed to entrench authoritarian power and have continued to operate according to their original purpose. But if rule of law was never the intended goal in these contexts, how should judicial performance be evaluated? What alternatives to democratic criteria can be used to evaluate authoritarian courts? Existing concepts emphasize democratic notions of law and justice and are typically measured by formal provisions (e.g. constitutions or laws) or opinion data (elite and household surveys). In this paper, I propose focusing on dimensions of judicial performance that are rooted in the authoritarian experience: specifically the scope of judicial authority. Scope refers to a court’s sphere of action, both its jurisdiction in law and its workload in practice. I argue that by focusing on matters of scope, we gain greater insight into how courts actually spend their time and their role in regulating political affairs. I consider different approaches for measuring this dimension of judicial authority, including constitutional provisions and the media.
“Combating Corruption in African Countries: Foreign Creditors and Domestic Institutions” with Leonardo Arriola (UC, Berkeley)
Although many governments have adopted measures to investigate and prosecute malfeasance by public officials, there remains considerable cross-national variation in institutional responses to high-level corruption. Under what conditions have governments established anti-corruption agencies? What impact have such agencies had on the prevalence of corruption? In addressing such questions, we argue that the origin of anti-corruption agencies ultimately undermined their purpose in African countries. Because governments established agencies to address the concerns of foreign creditors, principally multilateral institutions and Western donors, these agencies have been largely detached from domestic constituencies that might have otherwise demanded results. Moreover, since anti-corruption agencies are tangential to the primary interests of multilateral institutions, they have had little incentive to consistently ensure that agencies fulfill their mandates in practice. We assess these claims by analyzing original cross-national time-series data. Our findings show that anti-corruption agencies were established more rapidly in countries with greater debt service obligations, regardless of domestic political or economic conditions. We further show that anti-corruption agencies have had a negative effect on corruption: perceived levels have grown faster in countries that established agencies early on to satisfy foreign creditors.
"Regional Responses to Human Rights Violations" with Leonardo Arriola (UC, Berkeley) and David Dow (Duke)
Do regional human rights frameworks make African states more or less responsive to human rights violations in member countries? In partnership with Amnesty International, we examined the extent to which African regional institutions, anchored by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), have responded to human rights violations in conflict-afflicted countries across the continent. Using natural language processing techniques on a web-scraped corpus of official documents issued by the PSC and ACHPR describing the output of their meetings and summarizing their main platforms and agendas, we analyzed whether the PSC and ACHPR have fulfilled their institutional mandates to actively protect and intervene on behalf of human rights, or have instead espousing empty rhetoric. Our preliminary findings were included in the 2017 Amnesty International Report, "Africa: Counting Gains, Filling Gaps: Strengthening African Union’s Response to Human Rights Violations Committed in Conflict Situations."
Selected Works in Progress
"Ethnic Bias in Criminal Sentencing: Evidence from Kenya" with Danny Choi (UPenn) and Andy Harris (NYU-AD)
"The Political Logic of Judicial Appointments in Sub-Saharan Africa" with Danny Choi (UPenn)
"Politics of Courts Under Colonialism: Evidence from Colonial Korea 1910-1945" with ShinHye Choi (UC, Berkeley)
"Autocratic Constitutionalism in sub-Saharan Africa" with Siri Gloppen (University of Bergen)
"Ethnic Bias in Criminal Sentencing: Evidence from Kenya" with Danny Choi (UPenn) and Andy Harris (NYU-AD)
"The Political Logic of Judicial Appointments in Sub-Saharan Africa" with Danny Choi (UPenn)
"Politics of Courts Under Colonialism: Evidence from Colonial Korea 1910-1945" with ShinHye Choi (UC, Berkeley)
"Autocratic Constitutionalism in sub-Saharan Africa" with Siri Gloppen (University of Bergen)
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