Current Research
Colonial State Formation
Book Project: Violence and the Colonial State
How did colonial powers establish control and deter resistance in the late colonial period? A growing literature on colonial legacies has sorted colonial strategies into types: British versus French, indirect versus direct, or settler versus extractive. These types are then linked to long-term political, economic, and social development.
This project calls the usefulness and accuracy of these typologies into question. Colonial policy was more complex than existing typologies suggest. Further, what colonial powers said they were doing in their empire differed from what they actually did. Lawrence argues in favor of studying the practices of the colonial state. Through studying colonial practices in North Africa and beyond, she demonstrates the centrality of violence and coercion to the colonial project. To grasp the legacies of colonialism, we need a better understanding of how colonial rule operated within conquered states.
India & Algeria, Compared
While the literature on colonial legacies has flourished in recent years, relatively less attention has been paid to the origins of colonial institutions. What explains variation in the design of colonial institutions? Some scholars have stressed the importance of precolonial factors, arguing that institutions were designed to reflect the environmental and socio-political conditions that the colonizers encountered in the colonies. Others hold that policymaking reflected the colonial powers’ metropolitan identity and aims.
In “The Political Origins of Colonial Institutions: Evidence from British India and French Algeria,” forthcoming in Comparative Poltical Studies, Fahad Sajid (University of Chicago) and Adria Lawrence argue that these literatures have been insufficiently attentive to the colonial state and the political ideals of colonial bureaucrats. Drawing on evidence from British India and French Algeria, they show that land policy was shaped by intense competition between ideologically motivated officials, who disagreed over the uses and aims of state power. Theorizing the role of ideas allows them to explain variation in colonial policies across space and time while highlighting the indispensability of qualitative methods of analysis.
Draft manuscript available upon request.
Social Movements in Formation: Activism and the Politicization of Social Identities
This new project investigates the first movers who seek to politicize identities previously understood to be pathological or socially undesirable. Early activists making claims in favor of women’s rights, gay rights, neurodiversity, atheism, body positivity, and deaf culture, to take a few examples, have had to confront beliefs about the worthiness of those ways of identifying. How did activists develop their justifications for political action? What claims did they make to shift public discourse? Under what conditions did their attempts to politicize and redefine political identities as worthy of rights and recognition succeed or fail?
This project focuses on the earliest stage of social movement formation: when activists begin articulating demands for change on behalf of a marginalized social group. It examines the discursive moves they make to shift prevailing views, the obstacles they face, and the reasons why some identities become the basis for broader movements for rights while others do not.