Lotem Halevy

Lotem Halevy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence The Politics of Inequality at the University of Konstanz. She is a mixed-methods political scientist whose research examines democratization, national identity construction and politicization, and the political origins of exclusionary regimes in post-colonial contexts. Drawing on archival and contemporary data, she analyzes how the strategies of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties amid the turbulence of imperial collapse shape distinct pathways of regime consolidation, through contestation over who is included in the nation and who has access to the state and its services. Her work therefore examines the consequences of mass migration in authoritarian states and the boundaries of national identity, including processes of racialization. Her current book project, The Liberal Origins of Fascism: The Politics of Access in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shows how struggles over individual and collective inclusion in the state and civil society generate divergent regime trajectories in deeply divided and diverse societies.