Welcome!  I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.  My research spans legal studies and political economy (both international and comparative) and examines how legal institutions, economic inequality, and citizen collective action interact to shape state-society relations in globalizing autocracies. Regionally, I specialize in the politics of the former Soviet Union, with particular expertise in Russia, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus. I am a mixed-methods scholar and take a fieldwork-intensive approach to data collection.

My book, Seeking a Corruption Equilibrium: Authoritarian Legality in Central Asia (status - R&R), examines how a major dilemma in authoritarian governance -- balancing political elites’ demands for rents against grassroots discontent with endemic corruption -- shapes citizen-state legal disputes in two Central Asian states following economic liberalization. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in Kazakhstan, I find that former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev responded to waning popular support by introducing anti-corruption reforms and cracking down on officials' illicit behavior in some areas -- while preserving it in others. To do so, he turned to law and courts to manage, rather than eliminate, officials’ corrupt behavior. Focusing on property seizures, I show that channeling conflict over elites' corrupt behavior reduces collective action by victims, offers an improved outcome for some, and enforces minimal limits on officials' rent-seeking -- while also obfuscating and facilitating it. In short, turning to law and courts can facilitate a 'corruption equilibrium' – for a time. In neighboring Uzbekistan, economic liberalization adopted by the country's new president led to similar dynamics, but vulnerable citizens' appeals to international audiences at a critical juncture protected some from expropriation. My work suggests that in the long term, elevating legal institutions legitimizes them as forums for resolving citizen-state conflicts and fosters grassroots pressure for more fundamental institutional change, including more robust economic rights. Related work focuses on the cross-national measurement of judicial corruption in challenging political environments and its applications for policymakers interested in judicial reform. 

An exciting new research agenda centers on law, economic inequality, and mass collective action in the context of migration. In a series of co-authored articles, I examine migration in response to authoritarian repression. One project focuses on how domestic and international legal changes, in conjunction with emerging differences in economic mobility related to remote and gig work, have shaped Russian migration since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while the other investigates political, legal (civil rights) and economic push-pull factors among highly-skilled Iranian migrants in the West. Both multi-article projects also tackle questions related to how individuals' attitudes toward democracy and citizenship shape their decisions related to migration, and this broader topic of individual-level support for democracy constitutes the third major focus of my research. 

From 2017-2018, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. I completed my PhD in Political Science at the Ohio State University in 2017. Before coming to Ohio State, I earned an MA in Russian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg and a BA in History from Grinnell College.