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I am an interdisciplinary researcher with broad interests in the history of territory and borders. My current project examines attempts to abolish conquest and the annexation of territory, asking questions about what makes modern international order distinct in terms of the way in which the legitimacy of conquest is denied, what underlies support for the principle of non-conquest, and what influential arguments have been made for or against abolishing conquest. I am particularly interested in ways in which efforts to outlaw conquest have made possible various forms of empire, including US informal imperialism in the 20^th century. 

My previous project analysed the historical origins of modern territoriality and culminated in a book forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality. In contrast to most work on the topic, which begins with the European state ideal and assumes that this was “exported” to the rest of the world, I argue that the surveying and demarcation of linear borders has historically been a practice relatively separate from the sovereign state. Modern borderlines in most of the world emerged out of colonialism, and I examine the particularly colonial circumstances that led to their origins.