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.
Autocracy and Colonial Rule
This book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics (in progress; ed. Anne Wolf) considers how the colonial state differed from other autocratic states. (Pre-publication version here)
Abstract: Scholars have shown that colonialism shaped successor regimes, creating conditions that favored democratic or autocratic rule. Though there is much literature on the effects of colonialism, there is less about colonial rule itself. What, if anything, makes colonial rule different from other kinds of autocratic rule? Political scientists have many theories about how postcolonial authoritarian regimes stay in power, but fewer about colonial regimes, and this chapter situates colonial rule within the study of autocracy. Drawing on existing scholarly work, it describes late imperial strategies for ruling colonial subjects. It focuses on direct and indirect rule, offering an analysis of these concepts, considering whether they make colonial rule distinctive, and questioning what they meant in practice. Under both types of rule, colonial officials and their delegates employed repression and violence to suppress resistance. This chapter thus shows that colonial regimes share features with other autocracies that depend on coercive practices to survive. Studying the colonial era has the potential to broaden our understanding of how autocratic regimes function.
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.