My research asks why ordinary people make the choices they do in times of war and genocide: why they take part in violence, resist it, or look away, and how the same person can do all three. Several themes organize the work.
 

The first is defection: how someone who has participated in or otherwise supported state violence turns against it and begins saving lives. These reversals are common in the historical record and poorly explained by theories that treat killers and rescuers as different kinds of people.Read: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro-Level of Genocide (Sociological Theory, 2015); Three Stories and Three Questions about Participation in Genocide (Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2020); Genocide: Theories of Participation and Opportunities for Intervention (Law & Social Inquiry, 2023).

 

The second is boundaries: how the lines people draw between "us" and "them" (racial, ethnic, religious) make mass violence possible, and how violence in turn redraws those lines, hardening categories that were once fluid and leaving divisions that outlast the killing by generations.

Read: Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda Since the 1994 Genocide (Political Power and Social Theory, 2021); Unpacking Ethnoracial Violence: Categorization, Classification, and Valuation in Comparative Perspective (Contention, 2025); 
 

The third is moral judgment in the moment: how people actually decide, under pressure and uncertainty, what is permissible. My work here has revised a common assumption about dehumanization, showing that seeing others as less than human often follows violence rather than causing it — which changes what prevention should target.

Read: The Moral Career of the Genocide Perpetrator (Sociological Theory, 2023) · Theorizing Moral Cognition (Socius, 2020)

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