Research
Publications
“Simulating Reform: Statistics, Working Consensus, and Stop-and-Frisk Persistence in New York City,” with Jacob Loor and Hernán Flom, Politics & Society, forthcoming
According to official statistics, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program is no more. After a 2013 federal court ruling declared the program unconstitutional, recorded stop-and-frisks fell from a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011 to around 10,000 by 2016. We demonstrate that this portrayal of the program’s demise is more fiction than reality—a simulation sustained through underreporting and reclassification of pedestrian stops into categories that draw less attention. The simulation persists not through deception but through a working consensus involving police, politicians, media, and even advocacy organizations. These actors tacitly accept the statistics despite countervailing evidence, allowing each to hold otherwise incompatible positions: officials proclaiming stop-and-frisk outmoded even as the same stops continue under new labels, advocates celebrating its end even as the communities they represent report no real change. Our analysis shows how mechanisms designed to ensure government accountability can instead enable highly scrutinized agencies and programs to evade reform.
“Fictive Politics,” with Fabian Drixler and Anna Grzymala-Busse, Annual Review of Political Science 29 (2026): 289-307
No systematic framework exists to analyze the different forms of fictions in politics. We develop the concept of fictive politics to illuminate how actors simulate selective, alternative, or entirely fictional representations of reality while dissimulating incompatible facts. We distinguish three ideal types: deceptions, where audiences are unaware that they are facing a fiction; veiled facts, where audiences suspect a fiction but choose not to probe it; and open fictions, where audiences are fully aware that they are witnessing a fiction. We show that fictions answer critical political needs, including maintaining systems of domination, managing conflicts between competing interests and values, and facilitating cooperation between state and society.
“Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,” with Fabian Drixler, Politics & Society 53.1 (2025): 57-97
Around 1900, at least 97 percent of homicide victims in Japan were newborn children. Official statistics obscured this fact by reporting only a handful of infanticides each year, but they also preserved it in the guise of impossibly frequent stillbirths. We argue that this striking failure of law enforcement did not reflect insufficient state capacity. The statistics are best understood as the result of a performance, jointly delivered by subjects and officials to reconcile two conflicting values—the omote (façade) of the state’s legal protection of newborns and the naishō (tacit arrangement) of household autonomy over family planning and reproduction. Political performances are often seen as deployed by those in power to deceive, discipline, or dominate the population. We observe instead a more collaborative dynamic that allows states to extend their reach into society while also respecting the autonomy of the population through compromise and indeterminacy.
“When Counterinsurgent Institutions Persist: Unpacking Local Wartime Legacies,” with Rachel Schwartz, Studies in Comparative International Development 59.3 (2024): 379-408
What is the relationship between counterinsurgency and institution-building? When do wartime institutions persist once conflict has ended? Classic theories examine how war spurs new institutions within the central state, while extensive research on rebel governance examines how insurgent actors forge new rules to garner civilian compliance and cement control. However, the legacies of armed conflict for state institutions in the theater of war remain relatively neglected. We theorize the process of local counterinsurgent institution-building and the drivers of institutional endurance following counterinsurgency. By analyzing two local counterinsurgent institutions in Nicaragua and a shadow case drawn from Indonesia, we find that while state leaders may generate new institutional arrangements to elicit information and garner resources, institutional persistence is driven by local reappropriation as communities pursue their own postwar governance and development goals. Overall, this paper contributes a new understanding for the divergent postwar paths of local institutions generated amid counterinsurgency.
“State Building Amid Resistance: Administrative Intermediaries and the Making of Colonial Taiwan,” Polity 51.2 (2019): 231-60
Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945) is among the most successful examples of state building in the modern era. It is also a case where success was unlikely: Taiwan was an ethnically divided and violent frontier region of the Qing empire, where heavily armed communities had resisted attempts by rulers to exert control over their affairs for centuries. Unable to obtain the willing cooperation of community leaders in substantiating government authority within the locality, Japanese officials nevertheless succeeded at state building by transforming traditional institutions of state-society mediation into disciplinary instruments, thereby compelling community leaders to act against their own interests and aid in the realization of Japan’s modernist reforms. The case of colonial Taiwan has broad implications. It demonstrates what it actually would take to succeed at state building within the contexts and conditions commonly found in today’s ungoverned and undergoverned spaces, and it problematizes the prevailing notion that state building by imposition is compatible with liberalizing and democratizing reforms.
Manuscripts in prepartaion
“Porous Policing and Performative Law Enforcement in the Making of Modern Japan,” with Kaz Osawa
Meiji Japan (1868–1912) is widely regarded as a paradigmatic case of successful statebuilding. Among its most notable achievements was the creation of a large police apparatus that penetrated virtually every corner of the country, from the back alleys of Tokyo to remote mountain villages. Despite this pervasive police presence, political violence flourished. Thugs hired by elected officials disrupted parliamentary proceedings, intimidated rival politicians and their supporters, and even engaged in street battles by the hundreds, largely unhindered by the police who observed them. This paper explains this paradox by distinguishing between two processes the literature has largely treated as complementary: statebuilding and regime consolidation. In the case of Meiji Japan, defending the oligarchy against demands for political liberalization entailed the tolerance, and even encouragement, of political violence that directly contradicted the rational-legal principles the state claimed to uphold. We show that this contradiction was managed through reciprocal performances: the police performed impartial enforcement of the law while violent actors performed compliance with it, even when all sides understood these to be fictive. By publicly enacting the proper legal form, the state and its subjects jointly affirmed and normalized the very order they violated in substance—forging the rational-legal state not in spite of these fictions, but through them.
“A Legacy is Created in the Present: Japanese Wartime Institutions in Indonesia and the Philippines”
Why do some foreign occupations leave behind enduring institutional legacies while others do not? Despite the Japanese wartime occupation of Southeast Asia imposing similar systems of rule across the region for a comparable duration, its long-term institutional impact has varied dramatically. Through a comparative historical analysis of Indonesia and the Philippines, this paper examines the divergent fate of the tonarigumi (neighborhood association) system—a Japanese instrument of local surveillance and mobilization that disappeared in the postwar Philippines but, after nearly two decades of dormancy, was resurrected in Indonesia to become a central pillar of local governance from Suharto’s New Order to the present day. Whereas dominant explanations of colonial and wartime occupations emphasize path dependency as the principal mechanism of institutional continuity, this paper identifies an alternative pathway by which legacies are made in the present rather than inherited from the past. Occupation-era institutions survive when they are repurposed by postwar elites to build and consolidate their power in moments of instability and intense competition—an outcome made more likely when socioeconomic hierarchies are disrupted in the process of decolonization and postwar armed struggle. Paradoxically, then, political instability—not stability—can make institutional legacies more likely where path-dependent reproduction has not taken hold under foreign rule.
“When Legibility Weakens the State: Land Titling and State Involution in the Colonial Philippines”
Cadastral surveying has been a standard instrument of colonial and post-colonial statebuilding. By rendering the land—its boundaries, ownership, and productive potential—legible, it has allowed the state to penetrate society and regulate the rural economy. US colonial land titling reform in the Philippines departs from this pattern. The Cadastral Act of 1913 surveyed 50,000 parcels annually through 1935, compared to fewer than 4,000 per year under the previous system. But this legibility, far from strengthening the state or protecting the small-scale and subsistence farmers the colonial regime had pledged to defend, served instead to advance the particularistic interests of Filipino landed elites. Tenancy rose from 18 percent in 1903 to 35 percent by 1939, much of the concentration occurring through the cadastral process itself. This article argues that the Philippine case represents what Prasenjit Duara called state involution: the paradoxical hollowing of the state through the expansion of its bureaucratic apparatus. Against the standard view of legibility as an instrument of state capacity, the article contends that land titling, like other efforts to make society legible, is more accurately understood as a politically contested process in which actors interested in the outcome of institutional reforms participate. When bureaucracies are staffed by or dependent on the social classes and actors whose interests are at stake—that is, when they lack autonomy from society—legibility reforms undermine rather than support the construction of a rational-legal Weberian state.
Book project in progress
The Façade of Modernity: Veiled Facts and Open Fictions in the Making of Meiji Japan
Meiji Japan (1868–1912) is conventionally regarded as a textbook case of successful statebuilding: a feudal order transformed within a generation into a modern bureaucratic state. In just a few decades, the leaders of the new Meiji government dismantled the feudal domains and established a highly centralized administration that reached deep into Japanese society. With town and village mayors integrated into the administrative hierarchy, with state-sponsored neighborhood associations assisting in the work of educating, organizing, and mobilizing local residents, and with the police—stationed in almost every village—closely monitoring the behaviors of Japanese subjects, the state was able to see and regulate the population to a degree that surpassed most, if not all, of its contemporaries. Yet in this highly legible and regulated society, illegal gambling was rampant, tens of thousands of infants were killed with impunity, girls and boys were regularly sold into prostitution and indentured servitude, and political meetings were routinely accompanied by violence perpetrated by thugs hired by rival politicians. How are we to reconcile this disconnect between the prevailing image of Meiji Japan as a strong Weberian state and the pervasive illegalities and violence that defined the era’s social and political life?
The book argues that the conventional understanding of Meiji Japan is not wrong. But it reflects, in part, a façade of modernity—what the Japanese call omote, the public face that represents the political or social ideal—that the Meiji state and its subjects worked collaboratively to construct. In upholding this fiction, the state did not merely look the other way at the illegalities and the violence; it performed, and demanded the performance of, conformity to the rational-legal order it was building. In return, both commoners and politicians complied and contributed to the fiction by submitting false stillbirth reports that hid infanticide or by cloaking political thugs as auxiliary party organs. By allowing subjects to perform compliance even when the state had the capacity to enforce the law, the Meiji state prevented the tensions and contradictions in values and interests of a society in transition from erupting into open conflict. At the same time, such performances normalized, through the daily enactments of rational-legal authority, the Weberian state ideal. Japan was indeed successfully transformed into a modern state during the Meiji era. How it succeeded—through the reciprocal construction of fictive realities and the dissimulation of contradicting facts and behaviors—compels us to rethink our understanding of how a modern state is forged.