Minglaba! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia.

I study how institutions created and maintained by indigenous societies shaped historical state development in the Global South, with regional expertise in Southeast Asia. My research shows that indigenous political and social institutions (many of which preceded colonial rule) are key to understanding how colonial elites constructed state institutions, from allocating infrastructure to wield coercive power to replacing indigenous schools with state-controlled schools. I provide empirical evidence for my arguments with original data from pre-colonial and colonial records, integrating quantitative analyses of cross-section, panel, geospatial, and text-as-data with qualitative analyses from archival research.

My research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Education Review, and International Journal of Educational Development, among other venues.

You can e-mail me at htzaw@mail.ubc.ca or htzaw@umich.edu.