Africa to serve as Director of Governance Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. In 2014, she returned to the United States to assume the position of Chair of Political Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In June 2016, she stepped down as chair and continues at SIUC as tenured full professor. Research Tilley has adopted a critical position regarding the Middle East peace process and has authored several articles and opinion pieces criticizing Israel's occupation policies. In her first book on the topic, The One-State Solution (2005, University of Michigan Press), she argued that Israel's settlements in the West Bank have made a two-state solution obsolete. In her second book, she edited a co-authored study, commissioned by the South African Government and conducted at the HSRC, which found that Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are consistent with colonialism and apartheid as these regimes are codified in international law. Released initially in 2009, this study was later published in 2012 by Pluto Press under the title Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Tilley has also specialized in the global comparative politics of settler colonialism and indigenous peoples. Her book on Salvadoran indigenous identity, titled Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation and Power in El Salvador, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2005. She has also published or co-authored a series of policy briefs on economic development strategies in post-apartheid South Africa and on nation-building in Fiji and other small island states in the south Pacific. ESCWA report withdrawal Tilley co-authored with Richard Falk a report on Israel released in March 2017 by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), which accused Israel of racism and apartheid. This report sought to answer the question of whether Israel has established an apartheid system with regards to its relations with Palestinians inside and outside its borders. In this report, Tilley and Falk charged: "By developing discrete bodies of law… for each territory and their Palestinian populations Israel has both effected and veiled a comprehensive policy of apartheid directed at the whole Palestinian people." The pair went on to state that "Israel has exploited this fragmentation to secure Jewish national-domination." The report was strongly condemned by the United States citing anti-Israel bias; Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman likened the report to Der Stürmer,