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Exclusionary Regimes, Autocratization and Democracy

Sarah F. Thompson

Contact: sft35(at)cornell.edu

Post-doctoral Fellow, Social Scientists Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Sarah Thompson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Exclusionary Regimes, Autocratization and Democracy hub. Her research focuses on two related themes: traditional governance and women’s political participation. Sarah is interested in using experimental methods and collaborating with local partners to produce high-quality data and causal insights into political and economic exclusion. While at the Social Scientists’ Association, she will continue to develop her book project on traditional and state justice systems in South Asia, with a particular focus on Pakistan. 

Sarah received her B.A. in political science from Columbia University in 2016 and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2024. Following her postdoc, she will join Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government.

Sarah enjoys discussing and using various modes of transportation, learning languages, playing with her two cats, learning about historic homes and architecture, watching cricket, and consuming a both prestige and reality television.

Research project

Does Exclusion from Traditional Governance lead to Support for the State?

In 2018, Pakistan began incorporating its formerly semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into the broader state. Most notably, state laws and courts were to supplant colonial-era criminal regulations and traditional justice venues. As the prior criminal code rendered local Pashtuns subject to collective punishment, local elites broadly supported FATA’s merger. Meanwhile, women’s rights activists around Pakistan praised the idea of eliminating the traditional jirgas, dispute resolution bodies which bar female participation and operate under a patriarchal code. In practice, however, state presence remains uneven even after several years. My prior work shows that while an increasing number of individuals approach formal courts, some also engage in forum-shopping or prefer exclusive resolution of disputes by jirgas. In this project, I will investigate under what conditions individuals support inclusionary state regimes. How do identities like gender and ethnicity moderate access to institutions, and thus influence perceptions of legitimacy? What role, if any, do the substantive issue at hand or prior experience with the state play? To examine how (in/ex)clusion from traditional politics affects engagement with the state, I will leverage turnout data from recent elections, case data scraped from district courts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, original survey data, and planned qualitative interviews.