Emily Pukuma is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. She is currently writing her dissertation concerning British colonial legacies and democracy. It is a multi-method study of why democratic institutions survive in some contexts and temporal periods but break down in others. Her research design includes an original conceptual typology of former British colonies, comparative historical analysis of a representative case of each colonial type and statistical analysis of a comprehensive dataset of former British colonies.
Her findings suggest that variations in self-government and administrative development prior to independence continue to strongly influence democratic stability and combinations of these legacies generate different challenges for democratization. Her research aims to contribute to the study of democracy by disaggregating the historical period of colonialism into more manageable and comparable concepts, by contributing historical data collection, and by bridging two largely separate literatures on democracy and colonialism disconnected by methodological techniques.
During 2014-2015, Emily completed 15 months of archival and interview data collection in Ghana, Mauritius and Malaysia. This fieldwork centrally informs her comparative historical case studies. She also completed two months of historical data collection at the UK National Archives for the statistical analysis of the full set of former British colonies. This research was funded by several grants including a Boren Fellowship, World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship, Graduate School Doctoral Research Travel Grant as well as pre-dissertation travel awards from the Center for African Studies and Department of Political Science.
Emily is a former Managing Editor and Book Review Editor of the African Studies Quarterly. She is also a former FLAS Fellow in Hausa.
CAS News Bulletin: Week of November 21st, 2016