(Dennis) DAK Penu MSc

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 considers two big questions: why do decentralization processes yield conflict outcomes in some contexts and not in others, and how do these conflicts unfold? 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 aim to interrogate an explanatory proposition that suggests a link between the ‘communal context’ of a society and the risk of conflict. My project is funded through a fellowship from the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam and my research is embedded within the Governance, Law and Social Justice research group under the supervision of Prof. Wil Hout and Dr. Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits.