Research

Current Research: 

My current research is located at the intersection of international security; border and migration studies; and theories of race, colonialism, and empire. My book project is based on my award-winning doctoral dissertation and is entitled Bordering Whiteness: Race, Colonialism, and Violence at the European Borders. Bordering Whiteness traces the historical and contemporary intimacies between border security, race, and colonialism in the Global North. It makes the original and counterintuitive move of using “settler colonialism” as an analytic to understand border dynamics of violence and security in Europe (the “metropole”). Tracing the historical evolution of border regimes of migration security from white settler colonies to the “metropoles,” it uncovers the central role of borders as (post)colonial tools designed to settle whiteness as the nation-state’s true “native” and final “possessor.” The monograph also provides the first systematic investigation of the colonial genealogies of contemporary border security methods, connecting such practices to past techniques and rationales of repression and policing deployed at the colonies. In doing so, it re-evaluates Europe’s border violence as not an exception to a post-war liberal order, but rather as recurrences of historical, colonial logics of racialised expropriation, oppression, and (dis)possession within the metropole. The dissertation upon which this book project is based won the The Brett William Campbell PhD Thesis Prize in International Studies and received an honourable mention from the "European International Studies Association (EISA) Best Dissertation Prize."

Ongoing Additional Research Projects:

On New Materialism, Coloniality, and Race in Security Studies

This forthcoming article in Security Dialogue expands my theoretical contributions to IR theory; postcolonial and race studies; and security studies. This project critically assesses the new materialist “turn” in IR and Security Studies and advocates for a deeper engagement between new materialism, race studies, and post/de-colonial studies. Specifically, this piece critiques new materialism’s understandings of agency and ontology, illuminating how they risk concealing structural processes and dynamics of racialization and colonial violence that are imbricated with practices of security and policing globally. 

Border Security beyond Europe

This research agenda comprises two ongoing research projects that extend geographically the scope of my research agenda on border and migration security. I have, for instance, a co-authored research article with José Perez (Ohio State University) currently under review that critiques IR’s homogenization of the relationship between border and security worldwide. We argue that there is a broad Global North/Global South divide in how migration securitization is manifested. We depart from the idea that, due to colonial histories and structures, Global South states are overall positioned within the international system to have more “porous” borders vis-a-vis Global North states. This “porosity” is not accidental, but necessary for the perpetuation of capitalist, postcolonial, and neo-imperial dynamics of extraction and invasion. In the article, we compare dynamics of migration security in Europe and Brazil, showing with nuance the different ways in which structural pressures produce different securitization outcomes in those geographical settings. 

Another research paper, co-authored with Silvester Schlebruegge (Warwick University), develops a comparative analysis of Australia’s and Britain’s respective “Stop the Boat” campaigns. In this project, we compare the UK’s contemporary “small boat crisis” in the English Channel to Australia’s own migrant boat crisis in 2013, which led to the announcement of the highly militarized “Operation Sovereign Borders”. The focus relies on how the ‘boat crisis’ is constructed in both spaces as a racialised security threat. Particular attention is given to how narratives of migration crises as well as notions of belongingness, deservingness, and racial otherness travel across different (post)colonial times and spaces and how they legitimate and enable security responses. 

Future Research: 

Offshore Carceral Borders? Uncovering the colonial infrastructures of offshore carcerality

This research project is located at the intersection of security studies, post-decolonial theory, and carceral studies. This research will provide a major study of the contemporary use of offshore and ‘out-of-sight’ locations to detain undesired populations by Global North states. Examples of this phenomenon are Britain’s current use of barges to accommodate migrants ‘outside’ its territory; Australia’s transportation of migrants to detention centers on islands in the Pacific Ocean; and the use of islands by the US to incarcerate those accused of terrorism. Conceptualizing this phenomenon as ‘offshore carcerality’, my research will offer a truly transnational analysis thereof that challenges the dominant state-centric approach to dynamics of carcerality within Political Science, IR, and other Social Sciences. Specifically, I will provide a transnational analysis of this phenomenon that weaves together its colonial and imperial origins and histories; the contemporary discourses that legitimate it today; and the material infrastructures that underpin its current articulation. This project will start by tracing the historical evolution of ‘offshore carcerality’ as a distinct and persistent racial-colonial technology of security and governance; a history that ranges from slave ships, colonial prison islands, to contemporary offshore detention centers for undesired migrants and terrorists. It will then offer an analysis of its contemporary entanglement with regimes of security in the Global North. 

Property and the making of international order

This research project will deepen my contributions addressing the relationship between property and IR. Specifically, this research project will look at the ways in which modern ideas of property were and remain entangled with the making, reproduction, and policing of the so-called modern international order. Empirically, this research project will analyze how ideas of possession and property were central to the production of “modern sovereignty” and the constitution of “global color lines,” two foundational pillars of international order. s addressing the relationship between property and IR. Specifically, this research project will look at the ways in which modern ideas of property were and remain entangled with the making, reproduction, and policing of the so-called modern international order. Empirically, this research project will analyze how ideas of possession and property were central to the production of “modern sovereignty” and the constitution of “global color lines,” two foundational pillars of international order.