I am a scholar of war, peace, and political order whose research traces how states are built — and unbuilt — through the fiscal systems that finance conflict, sustain elites, and shape civic resistance. Working at the intersection of international relations, economic history, and political economy, I use Africa, particularly Sudan and South Sudan, as my empirical foundation — but from the premise that the Global South is not an exception to be explained. It is where the architecture of the contemporary world economy is most clearly seen. Using African cases to challenge established narratives of state formation, fiscal capacity, and post-war governance, I trace how revenue systems structure sovereignty, coercion, and political belonging over the long term. I am Research Fellow and Sudans Research Director in the Conflict & Civicness Research Group, LSE IDEAS, Department of International Relations, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics.

My first book, Of Rule Not Revenue: Predation, State-Unbuilding, and Conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, 1821–2023, has been invited for peer review by Cambridge University Press (African Studies Series), following endorsement by the series editorial board in May 2025. The manuscript reconstructs two centuries of fiscal governance from Sudanese, South Sudanese, and British colonial archives, drawing on more than 700 interviews and multi-sited archival research conducted between 2014 and 2024. It develops the concept of predatory peace — the reorganisation rather than resolution of coercive fiscal orders through peace settlements — to rewrite the history of war-making, peacemaking, and rule in one of the world's most protracted conflicts — and to rethink how peace settlements sustain the fiscal orders they claim to transform.

My research has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, with further articles under revise-and-resubmit at Development and Change and other works in progress. I am co-editing a special issue on global fragmentation for the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. Alongside predatory peace, my work develops the concepts of the revenue complex and civic fiscal resistance — how rulers finance coercive authority through externalised revenue flows, and how civic actors contest, redirect, or refuse extractive governance. This research in turn informs my work on collaborative and civic-centred methodologies for conducting research accountably with in-country networks under conditions of war.

My second book, Predatory Peace: The Making and Unmaking of Post-Cold War Order, extends this framework comparatively within and beyond Africa. It examines how post-Cold War peace settlements across multiple regions have functioned as fiscal instruments that reorganise wartime political economies, tracing how authority over revenue, rents, and extraction is redistributed through post-war institutions across Central, Southern, and West Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The book develops a new fiscal history of war and peace, connecting African cases to global patterns of transnational finance, geopolitics, and the international politics of intervention.

My academic work is informed by a twenty-year professional background bridging research, policy, and operations. I have held field posts in Sudan with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and in South Sudan with Crown Agents, and have worked with the World Bank, the Rift Valley Institute, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), among others, on governance, service delivery, and post-conflict transitions. This practitioner experience shapes the historical questions I ask and my commitment to research that speaks to the communities and contexts from which it is drawn.

I have taught MSc and BA courses on African economic history, political economy, and the international politics of conflict and the Global South at the LSE, Durham University, and the Institute of Development Studies 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 history, 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.

I am also Editorial Director of Boy Brother Friend, a platform examining contemporary art, fashion, politics, and diasporic worldmaking.