My scholarship is focused on the study of political violence, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and social movements and contentious politics in Africa and South Asia. I am a mixed-methods researcher: my work combines insights from in-depth, multi-sited fieldwork with descriptive analyses of quantitative conflict datasets. Through these approaches, I seek to uncover both broad patterns of violence and trace the causal mechanisms that generate conflict and collective action. I am also interested in the philosophy of social science and in small-N cross-regional comparisons.

My first book, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge University Press 2024), develops a theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between elites, political parties, and party-based violence. This research is based on a cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India with subnational comparisons in the two countries.

I am now working on my second book, tentatively entitled, The Politics of Anti-Rape Mobilization: How Constructions of Victimhood Shape Public Protests against Sexual Violence in India and South Africa. This book develops a unified framework about the making of “good victims,” and shows how differential constructions of victimhood interface with structural factors and dynamic forces to produce highly uneven public responses to lethal incidents of rape in India and South Africa. Drawing on evidence from in-depth qualitative interviews, participant observation techniques, and descriptive analyses of original and existing quantitative datasets, The Politics of Anti-Rape Mobilization accounts not only for variations in the emergence of anti-rape protests, but also for notable and observable differences in their pace and duration.

Research for The Politics of Anti-Rape Mobilization has received generous support from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the International Peace Research Association Foundation (IPRAF), and the M.S. Merian - R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies (ICAS) in New Delhi where I served as a Senior Fellow in Spring 2026. In addition, an article version of the book’s arguments received the Best Paper on Intersectionality Award from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of APSA in 2025.

To date, my research has taken me to Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Nepal where I have studied various facets of conflict and conflict resolution. I have also conducted policy analysis for the World Bank and the United Nations, and my writing and analyses have appeared in public-facing outlets such as the Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post, The Conversation (Africa), Deutsche Welle, and Vox.