I am an economic historian and political economist of war and peace. My research traces how states are built — and unbuilt — through the fiscal systems that finance conflict, sustain elites, and shape civic resistance. I am Research Fellow and Sudans Research Director in the Conflict & Civicness Research Group at the London School of Economics, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Economic History. Africa, particularly Sudan and South Sudan, is my empirical foundation and the vantage point from which I develop a global account of the financial history of conflict and governance. I work from the premise that the Global South is not an exception to be explained, but where the architecture of the contemporary world economy is most clearly seen. While empirically anchored in Sudan and South Sudan, my work is explicitly comparative, using African cases to rethink core debates in comparative politics on state formation, fiscal capacity, conflict, and post-war governance. My research develops concepts such as predatory peace — the reorganisation rather than resolution of coercive fiscal orders through peace settlements — and civic fiscal resistance, which describes how civic actors contest or redirect extractive governance. These concepts are grounded in long-form fieldwork and archival research: my first book, Of Rule Not Revenue: Predation, State-Unbuilding, and Conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, 1821-2023 has been formally invited for peer review by Cambridge University Press (African Studies Series), following endorsement by the series editorial board in May 2025. My manuscript draws on more than 700 interviews and archival work conducted between 2014 and 2024 in Sudanese, South Sudanese, and British colonial archives to show how revenue systems underpin enduring patterns of rule, peacemaking, and war-making.

My work has appeared in leading journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding with other works in progress. I am co-editing a special issue on global fragmentation for the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and lead research on collaborative and civic-centred methodologies for working with in-country research networks in conflict-affected settings.

My second book project traces the financial history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war and peace, analysing how off-budget revenue, shadow finance, and fiscal systems forged in conflict shape peace settlements, reconstruction, and political order across the contemporary world economy. Building from empirical foundations in the Global South, the project develops a global framework for understanding how predatory fiscal orders are reproduced—from imperial counterinsurgency to Cold War proxy finance and the political economy of modern peace agreements.

My academic work is grounded in a 20-year professional background that bridges research, policy, and operations. I have held posts in Sudan with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and South Sudan with Crown Agents, and have worked with the World Bank, the Rift Valley Institute (RVI), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and Oxfam America on governance, service delivery, and post-conflict transitions.

I have taught MSc and BA courses on African Economic History, Political Economy, and state capacity and public services at the LSE, Durham University, and the IDS at the University of Sussex. At the LSE I convene EH413: African Economic Development in Historical Perspective and supervise postgraduate research on war economies, fiscal systems, and state formation.

My PhD in History (ESRC-funded) and MA in Economic and Social History are from Durham University. I also hold an MA in Governance and Development from the IDS at the University of Sussex, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

In addition to my academic work, I am Editorial Director of Boy Brother Friend, a platform examining contemporary art, fashion, politics, and diasporic worldmaking.