Research

Ecocide as Event, Ecocide as Condition: Environmental Death and the Constitution of International Order (1970–1998)

The LSE, 2026. Supervised by Dr Shikha Dilawri.

My thesis traces how the idea of "ecocide" developed between 1970 and 1998, from its first use to the drafting of the Rome Statute. I argue that international law came to recognise environmental death only as an event, a bounded occurrence separate from ordinary life. Slower environmental death, which happens through normalised processes like development, is left out of the category. This reflects what I call environmental necropolitics: the power, embedded in international order, to determine which environmental deaths count as deaths.

The Greening of the Global Order: To What Extent Do International Environmental Agreements Affect Environmental Hierarchy?

University of Oxford, 2025. Supervised by Weishen Zeng.

My undergraduate thesis asked whether international environmental agreements reflect and reinforce an environmental hierarchy. I argued that this hierarchy is distinct from the way international institutions rank people. Through discourse analysis of 20 international environmental agreements, I found that the hierarchy works by separating environments treated as resources from those treated as valuable in themselves. It received the highest mark for a Politics thesis in my cohort.

Most of my research uses critical methods, which means I question the categories we use to understand the world and ask where they came from. To do this, I use discourse analysis of legal documents and historical records, alongside genealogical and archival research that traces how ideas have changed over time. In future projects, I’d like to add ethnography, so that I can learn from the people and places these frameworks describe. I also use R for some quantitative analysis and data visualisation.