Current Projects
Manuscript: West Africa’s World
With its early masters of iron and bronze, a golden medieval empire led by the richest man in the history of the planet (until Musk), and a current population of nearly half a billion people, West Africa deserves our attention. This is a political history of one of the world’s most dynamic and least understood regions.
Manuscript: Community in an Inward Age
Today, political community is often described as polarized and fragmented, but it also shows signs of a marked inward turn. If much of the late twentieth century focused on reducing the barriers to creating a sense of global community, of expanding notions of human rights and our sense of a common humanity, the current century seems to demonstrate a desire to focus on our own communities and emphasize our differences. This text considers the origins of our current moment and the implications for addressing our common global challenges.
“Portable Values”
An examination of how our views on the value of nature shapes our environmental policy preferences.
Some Past Work
“Ghana: Continuity Among Democratic Elites.” 2024. In John Clark, ed. Political Identity and African Foreign Policies. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Find it HERE.
African Coalitions and Global Economic Governance. 2016. New York: Cambridge University Press.
The proliferation of international institutions with overlapping scope and authority over issue areas creates strategic dilemmas for all states. While African states are often considered marginalised in world politics and global markets, Michael Byron Nelson shows how coalitions can form a crucial part of African strategies to influence international institutions and achieve results. Building a bottom-up analysis of global governance, through legal analysis, content analysis, and in-depth interviews, Nelson illuminates institutional and coalition dynamics through case studies of three key areas – food safety, intellectual property, and agricultural trade. He highlights the difficulties encountered by coalitions attempting to navigate institutional systems, emerging from institutional thickness (increasing the number of institutions involved) and integration (increasing the formal linkages between those institutions). Finally, Nelson shows how increasing the hierarchy of an institutional system, by creating a focal point on a single institution, can make coordination easier for coalitions.
“Africa’s Regional Powers and Climate Change Negotiations.” Global Environmental Politics, 16 No. 2, 2016, pp. 110-229.
Available at: MIT Press Journals – Global Environmental Politics
Two pillars underpin Africa’s approach to climate change negotiations: One is the “African Common Position,” and the other is the development of a negotiating coalition for presenting that position. This report explores the roles that Africa’s regional powers—Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa—play in supporting this African approach. These regional powers do not share the same interests as the rest of the continent. Not only do they differ based on energy production (Nigeria) and consumption (South Africa), but also in terms of their general vulnerabilities and readiness to face climate change. Even where they share interests, they often view these negotiation processes as serving goals other than solving the problems of climate change. Despite such issues, Africa still needs its regional powers to play a role in ongoing global negotiations, and the world will likely continue to focus on at least some of them as continental representatives.
