Cathy Lisa Schneider (American University, Washington D.C.)

From her, I learned that rigorous scholarship and deep human engagement are not opposites but allies. Her work on political violence and collective action taught me to listen carefully to those living inside the structures I study. 

Researching the UNDP's national decentralization program in rural Angola in 2011 was a turning point in my intellectual development. Witnessing the gap between international policy design and local institutional realities directly shaped my thinking about governance residues—how partial reforms can accumulate as long-term constraints rather than solutions. The experience reinforced my commitment to fieldwork, elite interviews, and grounded comparative analysis. 

Elinor Ostrom's concept of Policentric Governance. In her book Governing the Commons (1990), she shows that communities can self-organize for sustainable resource management. 

Her concept of polycentricity – multiple overlapping centers of decision-making – is a crucial starting point for my own work on crisis cascades. Where Ostrom asked how self-organization succeeds, I ask how accumulated failures across domains can erode that very capacity, producing what I call the topological trap: more rules, less resilience. 

Pierson, Paul. 2000. Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics. American Political Science Review 94(2): 251–267.

This article gave me the language to think about how early choices constrain later possibilities. My concept of negative governance residues is, in part, an extension of Pierson’s logic to the planetary scale: crises create path dependencies that accumulate as institutional friction.

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) engages with how communities spontaneously cooperate during disasters challenged my initial focus on governance failure. She showed that crises also reveal latent capacities for mutual aid. This insight now informs my research on buffering capacities – the conditions under which polycentric arrangements absorb shocks rather than propagate them. 

Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo (2000) is a novel that showed me how absolute power corrodes institutions from within, leaving residues of fear and silence that long outlast any single ruler. It is my literary touchstone for understanding governance failure as a deeply human – not simply technical – phenomenon.