Research

In my dissertation, I examine the role of history education (or its lack) in post-conflict peacebuilding. While many view confronting and teaching youth the past as key to reconciling from it and inspiring a "never again" mindset, many post-conflict governments instead attempt to erase their violent histories, avoiding discussion of them in schools and other public spaces. The first part of my dissertation builds a typology and original cross-national dataset of the different approaches to engaging with violent national histories, and theorizes about what makes some countries more likely to engage with their difficult histories than others. The second part turns to empirically examining the consequences of teaching vs. suppressing difficult pasts. I draw evidence primarily from Nigeria, which has rarely taught youth any of its history in the 55 years since the end of its Biafran Civil War. I first conducted an inter-generational survey of 2,590 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 then ran a field experiment with 3,652 students across 18 secondary schools to see whether teaching youth a fuller story of what happened in the war would reduce lingering inter-ethnic tensions and prejudices. 

I find that, despite peacebuilders’ hopes, constructive engagement with violent history is more likely the endpoint – rather than a driver – of broader reconciliation processes. I show countries’ willingness and ability to productively teach their violent pasts depend on whether victims’ grievances have been resolved and atrocities' perpetrators held accountable. In contexts without these steps, international organization and civil society-driven efforts to teach history are likely to raise the salience of divisions, rather than resolve them. Yet at the same time, I show attempts to “forget” the past rarely succeed, instead allowing poorly informed, yet polarizing historical narratives to spread within families and communities. Thus, at best, a partial reconciliation – characterized by stability, but latent tension – may be possible in countries unable or unwilling to confront their past. These findings highlight the obstacles in the way of full post-conflict reconciliation  — especially in countries where violence ended with atrocities' perpetrators retaining power — and raise questions for future research about how to overcome them.

Many see education about historical atrocities as a way to encourage the rejection of present-day violence and intolerance. But in polarized post-war settings, when, if ever, do schoolchildren truly “learn from the past”? I ran a field experiment with 3,650 students across 108 Nigerian secondary school classrooms, randomizing exposure to courses on Nigeria’s Civil War or the Rwandan Genocide. I find modest increases in intergroup empathy, tolerance, and opposition to violence, but mostly among students whose ethnic group was least involved in past atrocities. For students whose groups included the major perpetrators or victims of atrocities, learning history mainly reified divergent historical narratives and heightened perceived intergroup differences. Surprisingly, students also applied frames like victim-blaming to foreign history. These findings question the exportability of “Holocaust education” as a model for peacebuilding. In settings with more unresolved grievances and divergent historical narratives, “truth” alone is unlikely to lead to reconciliation.

While several studies examine the consequences of memorializing and teaching youth about past civil violence, few consider the implications of \textit{not} memorializing or teaching history. Many governments attempt to erase their violent histories, hoping society will forget past divisions. Little is known about how families and communities react to such policies, and whether and when (divisive) historical memories indeed fade. I provide evidence from Nigeria, whose 1960s civil war is rarely officially taught or memorialized. Surveying 2,590 adolescents and their parents across 1,295 households, I find parents tell youth surprisingly few details about past violence, but do pass down overall, emotions-laden sentiments, including beliefs that certain ethnic outgroups are historical enemies. These polarized, yet poorly informed historical narratives fuel current tensions, especially as the war’s memory remains strongest among the group that lost it. My results suggest efforts to ``forget" history are both unlikely to succeed and insufficient to erase conflicts' legacies, which are driven more by feelings than knowledge of historical facts. 

While some studies have found citizens' perceptions of election integrity are determined by partisan or other biases, others have found efforts to improve the competence and impartiality of electoral institutions can overcome those biases and improve public confidence in elections. However, few studies have examined this relationship in developing democracies, or considered the impact of the most micro-level institutions, such as the identity of the poll workers voters encounter. We explore the effects of a unique election reform in Nigeria: the deployment of National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members as poll workers. The NYSC – a nation- and tolerance-building project that mandates all recent college graduates spend one year serving outside their ethnic home region – markets its workers as unbiased, educated youth who are committed to national unity. Using novel vignette and conjoint experiments fielded in Lagos after the contested 2023 elections, we examine whether and how the status of poll workers as NYSC members influences Nigerians’ trust in elections. We find that voters believe in and support the NYSC, but that this patriotic symbolism and rhetoric is not enough to overcome their underlying mistrust of non-coethnics and non-locals. Voters, ultimately, dislike "outsider" NYSC poll workers and see their presence as increasing the chance of election violence. These results imply that nationalistic symbols such as national service programs are not enough to bolster confidence and unity around election time, and that intergroup contact is more likely to be negative than positive during elections. 

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.