Writing
A public research notebook.
Research writing and shorter essays. The concerns are the same across both; the register is different.
Public writing
Essays and commentary.
Shorter pieces written outside the constraints of academic form, published on Substack as they are written.
Writing on how institutions behave, who they serve, and why arrangements that work badly are often difficult to change. The archive is open and free to read.
Academic writing
Papers and research.
Examines how institutional dysfunction may be sustained as a rent-generating mechanism in alternating-elite regimes.
Examines how political elites, bureaucratic actors, and intermediaries can benefit from delays, opacity, and discretionary enforcement.
Notebook
Working notes.
Shorter observations and questions that sit behind the formal writing.
The absence of an institution and the failure of an institution produce similar experiences at the counter, but they are not the same political problem and do not have the same remedy.
If discretion is where rules become outcomes, how much of institutional performance is decided at a level that formal reform never reaches?
Work on rents, path dependence, and limited access orders keeps arriving at the same point from different directions: arrangements survive when somebody has reason to defend them.
Interviews conducted for the migration governance study repeatedly located the friction not in the written rule but in the interval between steps, where waiting itself became the resource.
Reform that changes formal rules without changing what actors are rewarded for may alter documentation more than it alters outcomes.
Comparative material from Sri Lanka and Pakistan suggests family resemblance across cases, but resemblance is not yet a mechanism. Establishing that is the next problem.