About
I’m a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for International Conflict - Analysis and Management (CICAM) at Radboud University’s Department of Political Science and an incoming Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse at the Toulouse School of Economics. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in January 2024. Previously, I was a Civil War Paths Fellow at the University of York’s Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War. My work is forthcoming at International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Peace Research.
My research sits at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. In one stream of research, I study the political economy of nonstate armed groups and the role of armed group leaders during civil conflict. My substantive focus is on the political economy of armed group adaptation and the impact of armed group leaders on organizational behavior. Much of my research is driven by two related questions: 1) how do armed groups determine the mix of funding strategies they use during conflict; and 2) how do armed group leaders, because of their past experiences or through networks, shape conflict dynamics.
In another stream of research, I examine the conditions under which individuals working in international organizations (IOs) are able to affect foreign policy and development outcomes and when they are constrained by their institutional context. Across both research agendas, I have collected original observational, survey, and archival data, and I employ a variety of methods in my own and coauthored work including quasi-experiments, time series analysis, survey experiments, and text as data approaches. Geographically, I concentrate on the Global South, specifically the Middle East and Africa.
I have received generous financial support from the Netherlands’ Dutch Research Council (NWO) Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), UBC, and York University.
Feel free to contact me at j.weiner@alumni.ubc.ca for more information about my research or teaching. I’m also on Twitter.