Emily Russell

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Linking formal and Informal Governance for Tribal Communities in Madhya Pradesh

Local governance, and increased representation of the marginalized, should increase government responsiveness to community needs. Yet, among communities historically abandoned or coerced by the state, increased state capacity and formal representation does not always correlate to better outcomes for public goods. This project examines how indigenous groups in Madhya Pradesh, India perceive state and non-state forms of governance. Using semi-structured interviews alongside existing data on state capacity, the project offers a nuanced and empirically-driven account of both formal and parallel forms of decentralized governance across tribal communities in India, aiming to answer questions about how such groups develop trust and distribute public goods.

Emily Russell, Department of Political Science

Emily Russell is a PhD student of political science at Stanford University and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Her research focuses on contentious politics, including the colonial persistence of coercive and capital forms, and contemporary measures of state capacity and violence. She is the recipient of prestigious awards for her hands-on fieldwork and archival work examining political violence and state repression, including grants from the Beinecke Scholarship and the National Science Foundation. In addition to scholarly writing, Russell writes narrative politics and co-founded Playwriting for Peace as a Davis Projects for Peace fellow.

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