Research
My research investigates the multiple and complex ways in which racial-colonial histories, legacies, and rationales shape contemporary international order and global security. My broader research agenda can be divided into two main axes:
Border and Migration Security
My award-winning forthcoming book, Un)Settling Whiteness: Race, Colonialism, and Violence at the European Borders (under contract with Oxford University Press), is located at the intersection of international security; border and migration studies; and theories of race, colonialism, and empire. (Un)Settling 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 dynamics of border and migration 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 book also provides the first systematic investigation of the colonial genealogies of contemporary border and migration 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 migration politics 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. This manuscript has 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."
This research agenda has also led to the publication of three award-winning and high-impact journal articles. My 2023 article in International Political Sociology offers an original theorisation of the relationship between migration security, property, and race, based on qualitative research examining security practices of confiscation and eviction targeting migrants in Calais, France. My 2024 article in Review of International Studies—shortlisted for the EISA Best Graduate Paper Prize in 2023—provides a timely analysis of the colonial and racial nature of migration and border violence in Europe. My 2025 article in Security Dialogue develops a postcolonial intervention into the “materialist turn” in security studies, rethinking how materiality operates in global dynamics of (in)security. This article was awarded the 2023/24 ISA Theory Section Paper Prize and an honourable mention for the 2023/24 ISA Best IPS Graduate Paper Prize.
Border and Migration Security beyond Europe
Additional projects look at the different ways in which race and coloniality shape dynamics of migration and border security beyond Europe, towards both the Global South and other parts of the Global North. A forthcoming article in the European Journal of International Relations, for example, examines migration security regimes in Europe and Brazil. Challenging the tendency within migration scholarship to treat borders as homogeneous or universal, the article demonstrates how distinct structural pressures and political histories generate differentiated securitisation outcomes across contexts. Another co-authored article (currently under minor revisions at Political Geography) develops a comparative analysis of Britain’s and Australia’s respective anti-migrant “Stop the Boat” campaigns. In particular, it examines how the “boat crisis” is constructed in each context as a racialised security threat and how crisis narratives travel across (post)colonial spaces, legitimising particular forms of border security and enforcement.
International Order and Global Security
Property and the making of international order
This research deepens my contributions addressing the relationship between property and IR. Specifically, this project will look at the ways in which racial-colonial imaginaries and practices of property and possession were and remain entangled with the making, reproduction, and policing of the so-called modern international order. Empirically, it analyses how imaginaries and practices of possession and property have historically shaped “modern sovereignty” and the constitution of “global color lines,” two foundational pillars of international order. In doing so, this research also examines the implications of such legacies in contemporary dynamics of (in)security globally.
Theorising Global Carcerality
This research project looks at the ways in which carceral imaginaries and practices shape international order, both historically and now. Specifically, this research project offers a novel reading of carcerality as a “transnational” and “transboundary” phenomenon in international politics, challenging the “territorialised” ways in which carcerality is seen in Social Sciences. This will pave the way for a new subfield in IR called “Global Carceral Studies”, which will bring together scholars interested in the transnational expressions of carcerality. Empirically, this research will provide a major investigation into the contemporary use of offshore and “out-of-sight” locations to detain undesired bodies in dynamics of war, terrorism, and migration politics. Examples of this phenomenon are Britain’s current use of barges to accommodate migrants “outside” its territory; Australia’s transportation of migrants to detention centres on islands; France’s recent plans to construct a prison for its most “dangerous” captives in French Guiana; and the US Guantanamo Bay. Conceptualising this phenomenon as “offshore carcerality,” my research will offer a transnational analysis thereof that challenges the dominant state-centric approach to carcerality. Specifically, my investigation will weave together offshore carcerality’s imperial genealogies and histories; the contemporary discourses that legitimate it; and its material infrastructures.