(Dennis) DAK Penu

Profile

My general research interests are in the links between Governance and Conflicts, employing Qualitative Methods and using Political Geography as an analytical lens. The working title of my PhD research is 'Regional Reorganization, Communal Context and Conflicts in Ghana'. It seeks to understand why decentralization processes yield conflict outcomes in some contexts and not in others. First it identifies under which conditions the conflicts occur and then it traces how the identified conditions interact to produce the outcome.To contribute to answering these questions, I apply multi-method comparative approaches (Congruence Analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Causal Process Tracing) to probe 11 cases of sub-national regionalization in Ghana. Specifically, I am interrogating an explanatory proposition that suggests a link between the ‘communal context’ of a society and the risk of conflict. My research is embedded within the Governance, Law and Social Justice research group.