Biography

Lachlan McNamee completed his PhD at Stanford University in 2019 and will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) starting in mid-2020.

Lachlan combines a regional interest in Chinese politics with a broader theoretical interest in state-sponsored demographic change.

Whilst at the EUI, he will be working on a book project exploring the conditions under which states expel and resettle ethnic groups. He has collected new historical quantitative data on ethnic cleansing and mass resettlement from China, the former USSR, Australia and Rwanda. Rather than domestic politics, land availability, or ethno-racial ideologies, he found that the incidence of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing is better explained by the military concerns of states and the value of frontier territory to state and settler. His goal is to complete the book manuscript by the end of the 2019-2020 academic year.

Lachlan also has experience teaching Chinese politics and comparative politics at an undergraduate level.