Conflict

How do counterinsurgency policies affect rebel and civilian behavior? How do the transnational dimensions of conflict shape the micro-dynamics of civil wars? This work explores the consequences of investments in state capacity, the efficacy of combatants’ efforts to build civilian support, and the resilience of militant groups under repression.

Militant alliances. A central contribution is the Militant Group Alliances and Relationships (MGAR) dataset, documenting 7,409 dyad-year relationships among 2,613 militant groups from 1950 to 2016. With Erica Chenoweth, Michael C. Horowitz, Evan Perkoski, and Philip B.K. Potter, I show that shared ideology — and shared religion in particular — helps militant organizations sustain cooperation under the shadow of state repression, even though shared state sponsorship (an established alternative commitment device) is far rarer than militant cooperation itself (IO 2022). With Horowitz and Potter, I find that leadership decapitation — especially the killing of a group’s founder — triggers alliance breakdown by weakening targeted groups, raising fears about operational security, severing personal ties between leaders, and inducing command-and-control problems (JOP 2022). And with Potter, I show that groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State build large transnational alliance networks as a strategic response to material or ideological deficits, trading operational capability for ideological credibility and vice versa (JOGSS 2023).

Refugees and conflict. In work with Austin L. Wright (conditionally accepted at the American Economic Review), I leverage historical returnee settlement patterns and previously unreleased combat records to estimate the causal effect of a large cash-assistance program for refugee returnees on conflict in Afghanistan. Policy-induced return had cross-cutting effects: it reduced insurgent violence — plausibly by raising reservation wages and discouraging labor-intensive combat — while increasing social conflict, an effect significantly offset by kinship ties and access to informal dispute-resolution institutions.

Counterinsurgency policies. Can state forces use reparations to mitigate civilian backlash to wartime harm? Using declassified microdata on U.S. payments to civilians wrongfully detained in Iraq (2004–2008), I find that detainee-release payments are robustly associated with reduced insurgent violence — effects that were greatest in mixed and Sunni areas, for attack types most prone to civilian informing, and when release was paired with other population-centric reforms to detention (JCR 2022).