Julia Raven is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley in political science specializing in military effectiveness and security sector adaptation. Her dissertation project looks at the ethnic exclusion in and effectiveness of contemporary militaries and explores their origins in the strategic variation of ethnic exclusion in colonial militaries. Her project, entitled “Constrained Militaries: The durability of colonial military institutions” consists of two distinct parts. First, she is building an original, cross-national dataset of colonial military structures through archival research in British and French archives. This will help us understand how and under what conditions colonizers made their colonies’ militaries ethnically stacked versus ethnically inclusive. This dataset project will also help break open the “black box” of the colonial era by codifying what is mostly undigitized and hard to access documentation, allowing scholars to statistically analyze pre-independence, rather than extrapolate backward. Second, she will be theorizing and testing the durability of colonizer-designed militaries in order to determine more conclusively whether the colonial era had any impact on the military designs in post-independent states, as we know it had on other economic and social institutions. The overarching goal of her work is to help policymakers understand the challenges to security sector reform and under what conditions reforms can best happen.
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