Research

My PhD thesis project is entitled ‘Financing and Reforming the African Union’ (working title) and is supervised by Professor Stephanie Hofmann. Professor Liliana Andonova and Professor Jean-François Bayart are internal readers from the Graduate Institute.

The dissertation book project unpacks the influence of funding on IOs. Secretariats – the bureaucracies of IOs – develop different types of relationships with statutory and external funders. My doctoral dissertation theorizes the impact of these funding relationships on an IO’s agenda and capacity, and focuses on the agency of the IO secretariat in managing relationships.

Empirically, I currently focus on the case of the African Union in peace & security and infrastructure development.

I also have worked on regional integration in the post-Soviet space, including on the politics of free trade agreements. I am interested in non-Western regional integration processes and their relationship with European integration. In particular, I study how the economic policy field is interwoven with other policy fields such as security, energy and identity in these relationships. In this vein, I have published on EU relations with the Eurasian Economic Union.