I am a social historian working on people’s experiences of coercion. I am interested in how oppressors and oppressed relate to each other and to the regimes of power in which they are embedded. When are freedom, equality and reciprocity defended, by whom, through what strategies and with what consequences? When do certain groups and individuals defend relations of inequality, coercion and exploitation? Who gets away with coercing others, who doesn’t, and why?

Over the past twenty-five years, I have been exploring these questions in relation to slavery, emancipation and abolition in African and global history, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2020, I have been the Principal Investigator of a five-year ERC Advanced Grant on the History of African Abolitionism (AFRAB, 2020-2025).