Welcome! I am an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many states are fragile, plagued by conflict or weak governance that threatens collapse. My research examines a variety of international and domestic influences on the stability of fragile states, especially elections in these contexts, bringing together insights from international relations and comparative politics. In recent work, I look at policing and community attitudes during crisis. I seek to better understand how different actors can foster peace and improve governance outcomes.

My first project explores elections in which rebel groups participate as political parties — something that I show occurs following almost half of all modern peace agreements — and argues they can engage outside observers and donors to help enforce peace agreements. The book examines original cross-national data on provisions for combatant parties in 122 peace agreements across 388 civil conflicts since 1975, as well as selected case studies based on archival research and interviews with nearly 100 former rebel leaders, government officials, and third-party policymakers. The results indicate that elections with combatant parties correlate with enduring peace, in contrast to existing studies suggesting post-conflict elections are dangerous. The results also show that election observation backed by donors conditioning incentives like foreign aid on compliance stabilize these post-conflict contexts, challenging common wisdom that peacekeepers must guarantee peace agreements with the threat of force. In terms of policy, the project suggests that the international community can assist in conflict termination at a lower cost than other forms of peacekeeping, for example. My first book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, is on this topic. It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. It is based on my dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 American Political Science Association’s Helen Dwight Reid award, given to the best dissertation successfully defended in the past two years in international relations, law, and politics. Related work is also listed in Research.

My second project examines how international actors help enforce domestic deals in fragile states. The project does four things: first, it redefines the typology of statebuilding to include consent-based outside missions, which I call invited interventions, where host states allow other sovereign entities to conduct security functions, including policing or prosecuting their citizens within their territory, and delegation agreements, a subset of these, where host states also delegate reform of their security institutions to outsiders. Second, it generates a theory to explain why domestic actors at times invite international actors to bolster and even reform their security structures – mechanisms that I argue allow for strategic constraints against opponents, for example – and, related, what effect the conditions of their adoption have on their outcomes. Third, it collects the first systematic data on these delegation agreements, opening a new line of inquiry on statebuilding. Finally, in collaborative work, it explores other forms of even lighter touch interventions such as providing messaging campaigns about violence and ratings of governance outcomes. My new book project, Inviting Intervention, which I workshopped last summer and am currently revising for submission, is on this topic. The pieces of these projects, published and ongoing, are also described in Research.

My third project which developed from my book projects but takes a new direction examines how institutional design, especially of police, shapes states’ responses to security threats. Much of this newer collaborative work fits into two strands. First, we explore trust in the police and, because policing success fundamentally relies on cooperation from citizens, the effects on security of different types. Second, we examine the coordination and fragmentation of different security institutions (e.g., military, police, paramilitary, militia) to see what effect the design has on combatting violent irregular threats such as rebellion. The pieces of this project, too, published and in the pipeline, are described in Research.

Finally, my fourth project explores the role of civilians during crisis including civil conflicts. A new arm of this project examines how American Indian communities in Arizona and New Mexico are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic through new survey experiments on attitudes about collective action on and off tribal land. More broadly, many studies and U.S. military doctrine suggest civilian support is crucial to counterinsurgency success, but most of this analysis treats civilians as merely a resource that combatants contest. In contrast, my work seeks to understand how civilians interact with and form attitudes about combatants, civil conflict, and peace processes. It consists of a set of articles based primarily on survey experiments in Colombia, Mexico, and Myanmar. My research shows that civilians close to the fighting draw on their increased awareness, specialized knowledge, and close-knit communities to form attitudes and selectively react. Policy implications from this project concern how to measure support for armed actors during insurgency and better engage civilians throughout conflict processes. As above, the pieces of this project, published and ongoing, are described in Research.

In each of these three projects, I use multiple methods to study these important questions. I collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data, including, working with co-authors, survey experiments (in Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Mexico, and Myanmar) and field experiments (Côte d’Ivoire). My research has been supported by the NSF, the Minerva Research Initiative, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and the Center for Global Development.

I teach on civil conflict, international intervention, post-conflict politics, and statebuilding, as well as the research process, as described in Teaching.

I was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2015-2016), a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego (2012-2013), and a predoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) (2010-2012). I received my Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in September 2012. Before coming to Stanford, I was employed by the RAND Corporation. I received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, while working with the Belfer Center’s Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I was born and raised in New Mexico, so I never turn down spicy food, especially a breakfast burrito, or pass up a good soccer game or long run.