Research Agenda

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

• How do ethnically and 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 the movement of human populations?

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 based on my dissertation. Its provisional title is Uncertain Horizons of Self-Determination: Politics and Strategy Formation Among Israelis and Palestinians After the Oslo Accords. It reconstructs and explains patterns of strategic adaptation by Israeli and Palestinian actors through and beyond the peace process.