Hi, I’m Shusuke Ioku, a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. I study historical political economy, combining formal theory with micro-level historical data to understand statebuilding and political extremism, particularly how the periphery of the state shaped state development and political radicalization.

My current research explores how radical elites undermined democracy in interwar Japan by organizing through civic associations that circumvented both parliamentary and military gatekeeping—building a grassroots ideological base in peripheral regions and coordination networks that culminated in the February 1936 coup. I also study how jurisdictional competition among feudal rulers in Tokugawa Japan enabled peripheral peasants to pursue mass exit instead of violent confrontation, constraining extractive authority from below. A third line of work examines how statebuilders in early medieval Japan deliberately hollowed out their own administrative apparatus by privatizing extraction, initiating feudal fragmentation most prominently in peripheral regions where central authority was weak.

Contact

• Email: sioku[at]ur.rochester.edu
• GitHub: shusuke-ioku