Emily Russell

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Policing the Plantation: The Long-Run Influence of Plantation Labor on Coercion in Assam

Political scientists assume a co-evolving relationship between coercion and capital in the process of statebuilding, but little empirical evidence is leveraged to understand the nature of this connection. This project posits a relationship between the origin and development of policing as a coercive form and forced labor (indenture) as a site of capital generation. Through archival and fieldwork spanning tea plantations in colonial Assam, I provide new estimates into the coercive consequences of forced labor. This work contributes to a growing literature using causal inference in studies of historical persistence and offers a political reanalysis of an economic question.

Emily Russell, Department of Political Science

Emily Russell is a PhD candidate in the political science department at Stanford University and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Her research is concerned with historical and ongoing forms of colonial and state violence, with a focus on coercive legacies of land and labor extraction in post-colonial democracies, namely, India and Brazil. She is the recipient of prestigious awards for her hands-on fieldwork and archival work examining contentious politics, state repression, and coercive institutions, including grants from the Beinecke Scholarship and the National Science Foundation. Russell is also an emerging political playwright and theatre facilitator, and co-founded, Playwriting for Peace‚ as a Davis Projects for Peace fellow, which launched as a creative arts initiative in postwar Pristina, Kosovo.

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