Overview
I am a PhD Candidate in Comparative Politics, with minor fields in International Relations and Methods, in the Department of Government at Cornell University. My research examines how citizens navigate political life under conditions of contested democracy and fractured statehood. Prior to Cornell, I completed a B.Sc. in Political Science at the University of Benin, Nigeria, where I graduated as the department’s Best Graduating Student (summa cum laude) and received a dissertation distinction. I hold graduate fellowships with Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy and the Institute for African Development (IAD). My work has received support from the American Political Science Association, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Cornell Center for the Social Sciences, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities Dissertation Writing Groups.
Research Focus
My dissertation examines coup-affected states in West Africa and the Sahel to investigate how citizens form political attitudes, engage with institutions, and adjudicate the legitimacy of authority when sovereignty itself is unsettled and actively contested by rival insurgent factions and military claimants. I treat military coups not as my variable of interest, but as precipitating events that expose and accelerate underlying crises of democratic legitimacy, a distinction that reorients the analytical focus from elite decision-making to citizen-level political behavior. This approach positions my work at the intersection of comparative democratization, political behavior, and state legitimacy, and it speaks to a broader theoretical focus on how individuals reconcile extra-constitutional and institutional modes of political engagement when the very boundaries of legitimate authority are in flux. Methodologically, I employ a mixed-methods research design that combines quantitative survey analysis and statistical modeling with qualitative discourse analysis, allowing me to triangulate large-N patterns in political attitudes against the situated meanings citizens attach to democratic and military authority.