Note: links to all of my published research follow this research statement.

Broadly speaking, my research falls into two main streams and two smaller ones. First, I have been researching and publishing on the politics of resource wealth (especially oil and natural gas) for more than twenty years. My doctoral dissertation and first book, as well as several articles, used the experiences of Iran and Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s alongside cross-country statistical data to explore how oil wealth was conditioned by the timing of its entry into developing countries. In the years since that first book appeared in print, I have published eight additional papers and a co-authored book on oil and politics. These works collectively have continued my initial research intuition that oil wealth a) has conditional effects and b) that sometimes those are directly beneficial ones, notwithstanding the resource curse conventional wisdom 'out there.'

Second, I have been conducting research on ethnic politics, nationalism, and ethnic conflict for about a decade now. In particular, I am interested in the dynamics of secessionism and separatist conflict. This interest has led me to empirical research on the former Soviet Union, the province of Aceh in Indonesia, the four Kurdish minority regions in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, the Touareg region of Africa, Balochistan in Southwest Asia, and more recently Western Europe and the American South. All of this scholarship has had a foundation of long-range historical dynamics, in which rebellions and episodes of mobilization sometimes more than 200 years ago still exert sizable influence on contemporary identities and mobilization around them.

My two somewhat smaller research streams focus on a) regime change and b) research methods. On regime change, I have built on the institutional focus in my first book to explore the determinants of both durable and fragile single-party autocracy. That project, titled "Life of the Party," is linked below. I also collaborated with Dan Slater and Gautam Nair to challenge prevalent redistributive models of democracy in an article published in 2014 (also below).

On research methods, I have remained keenly committed since my graduate school years to making ever better and more reliable use of qualitative data for causal and historical inference. In addition to the articles below, my two books and many of my published articles explicitly ground their approach to cross-country statistical research on an imperative of contextualizing and sequencing aggregate data analysis with qualitative modes of inquiry.


The Politics of Resource Wealth

Books

Rethinking the Resource Curse (with David Waldner). Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia. Cornell University Press, 2007.


Articles Ethnic Violence and Separatist Conflict  

Regime Change and the State


Research Methods




 Iran and Indonesia