Research

My research interests include political development, community politics in weak states, and civil conflict. My current research agenda includes three major projects.

My dissertation project, Civil Society, Civil War: the Use and Abuse of Civilian Networks in Conflict Zones, explores how community organizations constrain the strategic behavior of revolutionary movements. I argue that insurgent groups prefer to engage in political development in communities where their civilian allies are well-organized because such organizations help coordinate compliance with the insurgent agenda and police within-community defection to the state. Revolutionary movements engaged in political development often abuse opposition civilians and redistribute their property, confront the state and wrest away control of territory, provide social services, and recruit from local populations.

I test this theory in the context of Nepal, where grassroots forestry conservation groups disproportionately mobilized the social classes targeted by a revolutionary Maoist campaign to overthrow the state. I predict, therefore, that the existence of such forestry groups before the war should correlate with political development outcomes during it.

One paper from this project highlights the expected relationships between forestry groups civilian abuse by Maoists. Where forestry groups pre-exist the conflict, Maoists not only abused more civilians, but shifted their abuse markedly toward the Maoists’ upper caste enemies. You can read a working draft of the paper here.

A second paper demonstrates that Maoist forces fought earlier battles, displaced the Nepali state’s agents and service provision infrastructure, and created their own services and political education programs more often where forestry groups existed before the conflict. You may read a working draft of that paper here.

A second project, with Inbok Rhee and Clark Gibson explores correlates of local service provision in South Africa.  We argue that ethnic diversity provides elected officials with the opportunity to create clear-cut political coalitions, which should benefit service provision only where politicians’ re-election chances require coalition building. We demonstrate that while service provision at the municipal level is positively correlated with ethnic diversity, the positive effect of that diversity erodes to almost zero where the mayor was previously elected by a wide vote margin. You may read a working draft of this paper here.

A final project, situated in the Dadaab-area refugee camps and managed in partnership with Mike Seese, uses a novel geographic sampling strategy to explore grassroots support for states and insurgents in conflict zones. The project additionally aims to make contributions on technical questions of sampling, retention of respondents for panel surveys, and item non-response among vulnerable populations.