Research

In my dissertation, I examine the role of history education (or its lack) in peace-building and nation-building after conflict. While many view a truth and reconciliation process as key to peace-building, and history teaching as key to nation-building, many post-conflict countries instead suppress and erase their violent histories, avoiding discussion of them in schools and other public spaces. The first part of my dissertation builds a typology of the different approaches to engaging with violent national histories, and theorizes about what makes some countries less likely to engage with their difficult histories than others. The second part turns to empirically examining the consequences of confronting vs. suppressing difficult histories. I draw evidence primarily on Nigeria, which has rarely taught history in the 55 years since the end of its Biafran Civil War. I first conducted an inter-generational survey of 2590 current secondary school students and their parents to determine whether and what narratives about the Biafran Civil War have spread through families and communities in the absence of formal history education. I find that most Nigerian youth know very little about what happened; however, the little they do know is highly ethnically polarized, and contributes to modern-day distrust and tension between the groups that fought on the other side of the war. I then ran a field experiment with nearly 3600 students across 18 schools to see whether teaching youth a fuller story of what happened in the war would reduce inter-ethnic tensions and prejudices. I find, however, that increasing factual knowledge about the civil war does little to reduce current prejudices, with many students’ failing to accept the experimental courses’ message that violence, human rights violations, and the dehumanization of ethnic groups is wrong. Taken together, my findings suggest that inherited ``us vs. them” attitudes pose a high barrier to the development of a shared, unifying, and reconciliation-oriented narrative of history in post-conflict societies. In many cases, feelings, not facts, are what sustain the long-term legacies of violence.

In post-conflict societies, what do people born after the violence ended learn about what happened? And does what they know and believe about past conflict matter for their present-day attitudes? While recent studies suggest many conflicts leave behind long-lasting legacies of prejudice and grievance, it is unclear what role knowledge and narratives about the past play in this inter-generational persistence of attitudes, or where those narratives come from. Many governments in fact try to suppress knowledge of past violence, avoiding memorialization and the teaching of history in schools in the hope society will forget the past and move on. I investigate whether and what youth in these circumstances learn about past violence from other, non-government sources, such as their families and communities, and how this (lack of) knowledge affects current attitudes. To do so, I surveyed 2590 secondary school students and their parents across 1295 households in Nigeria, where the nation’s civil war has rarely been memorialized or taught in schools in the over 50 years since its end. I find that, in this absence of formal history education, children have learned surprisingly few details about past violence from their parents or other sources. However, what they do know is ethnically polarized; many youth view ethnic out-groups as historical enemies despite having very vague notions of the events behind those sentiments. These sentiments about the war (though not factual knowledge about it) are highly correlated with current prejudice and support for renewed violence. At least among the group that lost the war, being primed to recall the past further heightens these contemporary prejudices. My results suggest feelings, not facts, are what primarily drive conflicts' long-term legacies, and that non-state actors, particularly those whose grievances went unresolved during the conflict, are unlikely to allow conflicts to be completely forgotten even when governments try to suppress the past.

Following the model of Holocaust education, education about historical atrocities and conflicts is often seen as a way to teach youth to reject present-day violence and intolerance. But in polarized, post-conflict societies, can teaching schoolchildren about past violence truly encourage them to “learn from the past”? I present evidence from a field experiment in Nigeria, where historical conflicts have rarely been previously taught about in schools. Working with 3652 secondary school students in 18 schools across 3 cities, I assigned classes to take a unique 5-lesson course on either Nigeria’s Civil War or, for comparison, a more distanced international example of violence, the Rwandan Genocide. These courses combined the teaching of history with elements of “peace education” designed to build inter-group empathy and a recognition of the harms of group-based ways of thinking. Despite this, I find learning about neither national nor international historical conflicts made students more likely to oppose the use of violence and human rights violations, or to be more tolerant toward ethnic out-groups, relative to a survey-only control group. Many students voiced support, rather than opposition to, the ethnic stereotypes and dehumanization that drove violence in both Nigeria and Rwanda, and students learning Nigerian history tended to blame ethnic out-groups for what happened, even if they also recognized them as victims. My findings suggest knowledge of past atrocities does not always translate into a recognition of those atrocities as wrong. In post-conflict contexts, many youth inherit ethnically essentialist, “us” vs. “them” attitudes at a young age, posing a high barrier to efforts to build peace and inter-group empathy in the classroom or other settings.

While some studies have found that citizens' perceptions of election integrity are primarily driven by partisan or other biases, others have found that efforts to improve the competence and impartiality of electoral institutions can overcome those biases and improve public confidence in the running of elections. However, few studies have examined this relationship in developing democracies, or considered the impact of the most localized, micro-level institutions, such as the identity of the workers voters encounter at polling stations. This paper explores the effects of a unique election reform effort in Nigeria: the deployment of National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members as poll workers. The NYSC, which originated as a nation- and tolerance-building project, is a mandatory, one-year program which deploys recent college graduates to different regions of Nigeria, away from their birthplace. The NYSC markets its workers as unbiased, educated youth who are committed to national unity. Yet, as non-locals and non-coethnics of the regions in which they serve, NYSC poll workers could be met with suspicion instead, undermining trust in the election. Using novel vignette and conjoint experiments fielded after the 2023 elections, we examine whether and how the ethno-religous and regional identity, and status of poll workers as NYSC members, influences Nigerians’ trust in elections. This paper has implications for research on electoral integrity and democratic stability in polarized contexts, as well as for the ability of nation-building efforts such as national service programs to bolster confidence and unity around election time.

University students have often played a critical role in shaping political dynamics across sub-Saharan Africa. This article situates the expressed political attitudes of students at the University of Nairobi (UoN) within the context of current Kenyan politics. Given the high saliency of ethnicity in the latter, we are particularly interested in how university students define themselves, how they view and engage with the politicization of ethnicity, and how they view members of other communities. Using original survey data from the UoN collected in 2018, this article fills a gap in the existing literature on Kenyan politics, which seldom concentrates on youth or students. Our findings demonstrate that although Kenyan university students aspire to move beyond ethnic politics, ethnicity often shapes their view of their fellow citizens and government action. Overall, we do not find strong evidence that university students will alter the underlying dynamics of Kenyan politics.