My research uses a transnational lens to theorize the global roots of contemporary migration control, citizenship, and policing in Europe and the United States. Combining archival methods, interviews, and policy analysis, my research answers three core questions: What is the relationship between attempts to control migration and the development of new forms of state capacity? How did developments at the local and colonial levels interact in shaping contemporary policing and migration control practices? And how do societies decide who is worthy of membership?
Migration Control and State-Making in Europe
How did European states develop their contemporary capacities? Existing research has primarily examined processes of state making through the lens of political economy, war, or the role of identity and religion. My research departs from these approaches by exploring how attempts to control mobility at the local and colonial levels led to the development of core state capacities.
My first book, Controlling Migrants: Vagrancy, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany (under contract with Oxford University Press), develops these insights by asking how and why states categorize some people as illegal. Through a case study of pre-World War II Germany, Controlling Migrants argues that ‘migrant illegality’ is historically produced through the entanglements of subnational-local and global-colonial mobility controls that were aimed at excluding racist minorities and controlling workers. Drawing on 15 months of archival research in Germany and the UK, the book develops a multi-scalar methodology that connects developments at the parish, national, and colonial levels and shows how laws, policies, and practices were refined and sharpened as they traversed these multiple geographic spaces.
Local-Colonial Entanglements of Policing, Borders, and Citizenship
My second line of inquiry theorizes how policing and mobility controls at the local and colonial levels shaped each other. While the existing literature has made important headway into capturing the colonial roots of these practices, my research further advances these insights by revealing the multi-directional entanglements between the parish and the colony.
I started this work by co-leading the drafting of “Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago” (International Political Sociology). The article interrogates how neoliberal practices of control are rooted in colonial laws by tracing the colonial histories of policing, border controls, and surveillance. The article has been described as an agenda-setting piece, was IPS’ second most-read article of 2021, and has been cited more than 100 times.
My most recent publications expand this argument. “Countermapping the Carceral Security State” (International Studies Quarterly) demonstrates how policing, bordering, and confinement were developed as they moved back-and-forth between the colony and the metropole. “Vagrancy Laws, Colonialism, and the Policing of Misdemeanors,” published in Imperial Entanglements of Policing, tells a global history of broken windows policing in the US. The chapter argues that these practices are rooted in British vagrancy laws that came to the US via the Caribbean and the American South where they were used to control formerly enslaved people.
Drawing on the research for my book, “Seeing Like a Racial State” (South Atlantic Quarterly) theorizes how Germany’s 1913 citizenship act emerged out of the intersecting demands of German overseas colonialism, territorial expansion in Eastern Europe, German mass emigration to the Americas, shifting labor needs, and the increase of foreign workers in Germany. “Arresting Movement,” published in Punishment & Society, examines how histories of the workhouse and the German concentration camps in Namibia influenced immigration detention in Germany.
Related Publications:
“Seeing like a Racial State: The Colonial and Racial Capitalist Roots of German Citizenship.” 2026. South Atlantic Quarterly. 125 (1): 147–169. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-12189501.
“Vagrancy Laws, Colonialism, and the Policing of Misdemeanors.” 2026. In Stuart Schrader and Julian Go (eds) Imperial Entanglements of Policing. Duke University Press: 31-52.
“Countermapping the Carceral Security State: Beyond the Imperial Boomerang.” With Ida Danewid. 2025. International Studies Quarterly. 69(4). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqaf070.
“Arresting Movement: The History of German Immigration Detention Beyond the Camp.” 2024. Punishment & Society. 26(3), 465-485. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745241230391.
“Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago: Rethinking the Neoliberal Security State.” 2021. With Ida Danewid, Asher Goldstein, Matt Mahmoudi, Burak Cemal Tansel, and Lauren Wilcox. International Political Sociology. 15(3): 415-439. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab013.
Related Media Appearances:
“Targeting Jewish Migrants and Unwanted Foreigners in the 1920s: The History of Germany’s First Immigration Detention Sites.” Available here.
“Deutschlands erstes Abschiebegefängnis.” Available here. .
The Construction of the Deserving Citizen
Seeking to understand how societies construct who is considered worthy of belonging, my work examines how conceptions of deservingness evolve in line with cultural norms of the moment in which they exist and are further mediated by current economic and political conditions.
Each chapter in my book, Controlling Migrants, asks how the targeting of those deemed unwanted was justified. It reveals that the media and politicians constructed foreigners as threats to individual citizens, by, portraying them as criminals or saying they steal jobs; threats to the economy, by accusing them of taking advantage of social services; and as threats to the state by saying they would undermine the political system. Doing so, the book provides a comprehensive framework through which to understand how migrants are turned into security threats.
“‘We try to Humanize their Stories” (Millennium) examines how humanitarian organizations represent migrants to solicit support. Drawing on 24 interviews, the article shows that organizations responded to critiques of framing migrants as voiceless victims by emphasizing individual resilience and ‘shared humanity.’ However, the article argues that these strategies still operate through an understanding of worthiness predicated on individual deservingness. This, the article further argues, is grounded in the political economy of humanitarianism which focuses on individual donors who want to identify with the impact they have on individual recipients.
Related Publication:
“‘We try to Humanise their Stories’: Interrogating the Representation of Migrants and Refugees Through the Shift from ‘Poverty Porn’ to Humanisation and Resilience.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298231161154.