Research
My work sits at the intersection of global history, historical international relations, and South Asian studies. My early research focused on colonial India’s borderlands, examining how frontier regions shaped British imperial strategy, US Cold War policy, and South Asian regional relations, as well as the ways in which local communities evaded or manipulated state controls during and after the independence of Pakistan and India. I took forward this confluence of interests - in decolonization, the global Cold War, and South Asian history - with my work on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a global anticolonial and ideological conflict. I am now expanding upon my interests in anti-colonialism, nation-building, statehood, and contested notions of citizenship in my new work, a global history of decolonization. My work has focused on interrogating notions of “center” and “periphery” and foregrounding Afghanistan and Pakistan in the study of South Asia and as key sites of anticolonialism and international politics. More broadly, it has explored developing norms in global politics, emergent tensions between great power politics, middle powers, and non-state actors, and competing notions of modernity, independence, and self-determination.
Current Projects
Decolonization: A Global History
The history of the past 200 years has been that of independence: freedom for peoples and states or, alternatively, its denial and suppression. Decolonization: A Global History offers a new world history, starting in late eighteenth-century Haiti, during the Age of Revolutions, and continuing through the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the present day. Rather than exploring the past from the vantage of imperial powers, it follows the people, organizations, and ultimately countries that pursued political independence across Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In turn, it explores how decolonization reshaped sovereignty and popular politics, the meaning of nationhood, and the relationship between state and citizens.
I will present my early findings in the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Lecture at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in June 2025.
Decolonization’s Discontents: Dissent and Opposition in the Aftermath of Independence
Decolonization did not lead smoothly or seamlessly into a world of independent nation-states, and many anticolonial leaders, activists, and communities were left disappointed by the societies and politics that emerged. Much has been written about competing and overlapping forms of mobilization that arose as colonial subjects and organizations fought for political independence across the colonized world, with focus on intra-colonial, regional, and global forms of activism and circuits of knowledge. But what happened after the “moment” of decolonization? Decolonization necessitated the triumph of certain nationalist visions and political frameworks over others. “Decolonization’s Discontents” focuses on oppositional politics and modes of dissent in the era of independence. It centers those who dissented against emerging (inter)national socio-political norms, interrogating decolonization’s limitations, the tensions between anticolonial and postcolonial visions of personhood and nationhood, and lingering opportunities for transnational activism in a milieu increasingly divided by nation-state borders and politics.
Other writing
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‘The Construction of “Tribe” as a Socio-Political Unit in Global History’, Historical Journal, special issue on ‘Global Social History’, doi:10.1017/S0018246X24000323
‘Constitutions and Modernity in Post-Colonial Afghanistan: Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and the Making of an Afghan Nation-State’, Law and History Review special issue, ‘Laws, Courts, and Constitutions in Twentieth-Century South Asia’, 41, no. 2 (2023): 295-315
‘States, Nations, and Self-Determination: Afghanistan and Decolonization at the United Nations’, Journal of Global History 17, no. 2 (2022): 272-91
‘Where National and International Meet: Borders and Border Regions in Postcolonial India’, International History Review 44, no. 4 (2022): 856-73
‘Afghan Internationalism and the Question of Afghanistan’s Political Legitimacy’, Afghanistan: The Journal of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies 1, no. 1 (2018): 68-94
‘Spooks, Tribes, and Holy Men: The Central Intelligence Agency and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan’, Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2018): 240-62
with Daniel Haines, ‘Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947-1965’, Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 4 (2017): 963-85
‘At the Nation-State’s Edge: Centre-Periphery Relations in Post-1947 South Asia’, The Historical Journal 59, no. 2 (2016): 509-39
‘British India versus the British Empire: The Indian Army and an Impasse in Imperial Defence, c. 1919-39’, Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 301-29
‘The Great Game Anew: US Cold War Policy and Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, 1947-65’, International History Review 35, no. 4 (2013): 783-806
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‘Ronald Reagan and the Crisis of Southwest Asia’, in The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s, eds. Jonathan Hunt and Simon Miles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), 367-86
‘The United States and Afghanistan: An Economic and Political Impasse, 1945-2015’, in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations, Colonial Era to the Present, ed. Christopher Dietrich (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 1005-26
‘On Asian Borders: The Value of Comparative Studies’, in Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands, eds. Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2020), 45-58
‘Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision: Comparative British and American Approaches in the Twentieth Century’, in Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (London: Hurst & Co., 2019), 299-317