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About me

I am an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for International Policy Studies.

 

My research is situated at the intersection of global historical sociology, postcolonialism and international practice theory. I am interested in global policing, the link between external and internal security, and how practices and discourses of intervention circulate transnationally. I am the author of Police Peacekeeping: The UN, Haiti, and the Production of Global Social Order (Oxford 2023), and my work has appeared in Internatonal Studies Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, Small Wars & Insurgencies, International  Peacekeeping, European Journal of International Security, and Globalizations.

 

Before joining the University of Ottawa, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université de Montréal, and completed a PhD in Political Science at McGill University.

Research

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UNITED NATIONS POLICING

My book, Police Peacekeeping: The UN, Haiti, and the Production of Global Social Order  (Oxford University Press 2023, book page here) investigates the growing importance of police forces and policing tasks in UN-led peace operations. I argue that intervening through the lens of policing leads to the depolititication and criminalization of conflict. Furthermore, what happens in peacekeeping does not stay in peacekeeping, because peace operations are a key link in the global transmission of policing discourses and practices. Through this circulation, peace operations participate in the (re)production of social orders that are based on the exclusion and aggressive policing of often racialized, socio-economically marginalized populations both in countries of intervention and internationally. The research is based on fieldwork in Haiti and New York.

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The book is reviewed in International Peacekeeping here.

THE GLOBAL MAKING OF CANADIAN POLICE?

How do the international missions of Canadian police officers affect domestic policing in Canada? Like in other settler colonial societies, policing in Canada has always blurred the supposedly clear lines between domestic and international, inside and outside, peace and war, and police and military. This project teases out the continuities between this history and contemporary policing in Canada, by examining the current entanglements between policing “at home” and policing “abroad.” It is funded by an Insight Development Grant from SSHRC (2022-2024) and involves Colleen Bell (University of Saskatchewan) as a Co-Investigator.

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Publications

PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES

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  • "Agency Is Positionally Distributed: Practice Theory and (Post-) Colonial Structures" (with Vincent Pouliot), International Studies Quarterly (link).

  • "Recentring the Colonitality of Global Policing" (with Colleen Bell) (2022), Third World Quarterly, vol. 43 no. 10, pp. 2488-2508 (link)

  • “The Multilateral Production of Global Policing: UN Peace Operations as Hubs for Protest Policing” (2022), Small Wars & Insurgencies, vol. 33 no. 4-5, pp. 846-867 (link)

  • “International Peacebuilding as a Case of Structural Injustice” (2020), International Peacekeeping, vol. 27 no. 2, pp. 263-288 (link)

  • “United Nations Peace Operations as International Practices: Revisiting the UN Mission’s Armed Raids against Gangs in Haiti” (2018), European Journal of International Security, vol. 3 no. 3, pp. 364-381 (link)

  • “In Whose Interest? The UN’s Strategic Rapprochement with Business in the Sustainable Development Agenda” (2016), Globalizations, vol. 13 no. 2, pp. 188-202 (link)

  • “The United Nations Guidelines on the Use of Armed Private Security: Towards a Normalisation of UN Use of Security Contractors?” (2014), International Community Law Review, vol. 16 no. 4, pp. 461-474 (link)

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BOOK REVIEWS AND REVIEW ESSAYS

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  • “Unraveling the Crime-Development Nexus, by Jarrett Blaustein, Nathan Pino, and Tom Chodor”, International Affairs, vol 99 no. 4, pp. 1799–1801 (link)

  • “Policing, security sector reform and the rule of law: More state, more security?” (review essay), International Peacekeeping,  vol. 30 no. 1, pp. 53-61 (link)

  • “Paternalism Beyond Borders, edited by Michael Barnett, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016”, International Peacekeeping, vol. 26 no. 2, pp. 247-251 (link)

     

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  • Introduction to qualitative methods in political science, POLI 313, Department of Political Science, McGill University, Winter 2022

  • Global conflict and development, INTD 397, Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University, Fall 2020 (online)

Teaching

Knowledge Mobilization & Media

I have been a commentator in local and international media on a variety of issues relating to the UN, peacekeeping, and Haiti. I am also the author and co-author of policy-oriented reports.

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Recent publications

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Recent commentary

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