Research

How the research works

Research process

Each project moves through the same sequence — a question, an archive, a dataset, a map, an argument, and a public output. The steps look like a pipeline, but in practice they loop back on each other.

1. 01 Question Start with a historical puzzle — something that does not fit the standard account.

   The question has to be specific enough to answer with evidence and consequential enough to matter. For the airlines project: why did newly independent states invest in national airlines immediately after independence, even when they could not afford them? For Western Sahara: can road infrastructure serve as a proxy for measuring territorial consolidation over time?
2. 02 Archive Find where the evidence lives — documents, images, data, field observation.

   Archives can be paper (the Mohammed VI Library at AUI, the National Archives of Morocco), digital (airline route databases, ICAO records, OpenStreetMap history), or field-based (on-the-ground observation and interview notes from Morocco and Oman). Knowing the archive's gaps matters as much as knowing its contents.
3. 03 Dataset Build structured data where the archive is fragmented or comparative.

   Some questions require reconstructing evidence from scratch. The African airlines dataset combines ICAO records, airline histories, Wikipedia entries, and regional databases into a unified 723-airline, 54-country spreadsheet. The Western Sahara road data required pulling OpenStreetMap history through the ohsome API and computing year-by-year road stock for each territory from 2008 to 2025.
4. 04 Map Visualize the spatial and temporal structure of the evidence.

   Mapping is both analytical and communicative. It reveals patterns invisible in tables — the geographic clustering of airline founding dates, the directional expansion of road networks from north to south across Western Sahara — and makes those patterns legible to audiences who have not read the underlying data.
5. 05 Argument Build the historical claim that the evidence supports.

   The argument connects the empirical pattern to a broader historical or political interpretation. Airlines were not just transportation infrastructure — they were sovereignty performances, proof to the world and to domestic audiences that the new state was real and operational. Western Sahara roads are not just roads — they are territorial infrastructure, making Moroccan administrative presence materially durable in a contested zone.
6. 06 Public Output Make the argument accessible without dumbing it down.

   Public outputs include conference papers, slide decks, interactive databases, Substack posts, and YouTube videos. The goal is for the research to reach people who can use it: other historians, journalists, policymakers, and anyone curious about North Africa and postcolonial state-building. The interactive African Airlines encyclopedia is the fullest expression of this — 723 airlines in a searchable, mappable, downloadable format.