Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Changing the Guard: Rebel Leadership Targeting in Syria. International Interactions (conditionally accepted).

This paper examines how leadership targeting affects the violent conduct of armed groups during civil war at the group-level as well as the conflict-level. Armed groups often possess a clear central command that exerts control over the group’s constituent parts, but there is conflicting evidence regarding the role of leaders and how armed groups respond to leadership strikes. At the group-level, I examine whether leadership change affects the battlefield efficacy of armed groups using original leadership strike data on armed groups during the Syrian civil war. At the conflict-level, I assess how the population of groups not subjected to a leadership strike change their behavior in response to successful attacks. I find that successful leadership strikes degrade groups by reducing their battlefield efficacy while also reducing overall levels of violence in the conflict in the short term. This points to risk aversion as an understudied mechanism in conflicts with multiple armed groups.

Armed Group Extraction Strategies. 2026. Civil Wars 28 (2-3).

Armed groups use many methods to meet their revenue needs. While some existing theory posits that resource rents preclude groups from taxing, empirically, some groups extract both resources and taxes. I argue that armed groups operate in a governance equilibrium and that their extraction strategies are not mutually exclusive or independent from one another. Instead, groups invest in extraction that offers the highest net marginal benefit. Using a cross-national quantitative design, I find that, counterintuitively, extracting resource rents leads groups to increase taxation in the future. Additionally, multiple extraction strategies lead groups to deepen their governance practices, though heterogeneity remains.

Aid and Armed Actors: Cooperation and Aid Delivery in the DRC with Haley Swedlund, Marie-Eve Desrosiers, and Pierre Sosthène Kambidi. 2026. World Development 208.

In conflict-affected contexts, the presence of armed actors—including state security forces, international peacekeeping missions, and non-state armed groups—means that aid organisations may need to cooperate with these actors to deliver foreign aid. Yet the conditions under which this cooperation happens remain underspecified. In this article, we use novel mixed methods data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to study these conditions. Building on qualitative interviews with Kinshasa-based aid practitioners, as well as a survey and survey experiment with Congolese provincial-level aid workers, we provide systematic evidence of the conditions under which humanitarian and development aid workers are more or less likely to collaborate with different types of armed actors across different regions of the country. We test three hypotheses: the type of armed actor, the visibility of cooperation, and the proximity to conflict. Our findings suggest that the type of armed actor and the proximity of the aid workers to conflict matter most. The public visibility of their collaboration is less important than anticipated. For those at the forefront of aid delivery, it is primarily the concrete realities and day-to-day interactions that appear to shape decision-making and behavior.

Leadership Succession and Jihadist Beheadings with Mark Berlin and Ilayda B. Onder. 2026. Journal of Global Security Studies 11 (3).

Why do armed groups use extreme forms of violence? Existing research argues that ideological beliefs, organizational alliances, and efforts to generate publicity or provoke external enemies drive armed groups’ use of extreme violence. Building on existing scholarship, this study explores the incentives of different types of militant leaders to sanction beheading attacks. Leadership transitions create authority crises within armed groups. We argue that these pressures incentivize successor leaders to employ extreme and costly violence like beheadings as a tool of internal consolidation and external signaling. To examine these arguments, we combine an original dataset on the backgrounds and experiences of 206 leaders of 108 different jihadist groups with event-level data on beheading attacks. In doing so, we find that jihadist organizations are significantly more likely to use beheadings under successor leaders. This effect is pronounced among successors who come to power following the arrest or death of their predecessors at the hands of state forces. However, the use of beheadings under successors decreases as their time in power increases, indicating the diminishing returns of using extreme violence over time. These findings contribute to scholarship on militant leaders, the consequences of counterterrorism policies, and the strategic logic of armed group violence.

Commanders of the Mujahideen: Introducing the Jihadist Leaders Dataset (JLD) with Maria Amjad, Mark Berlin, Sara Daub, and Ilayda B. Onder (equal contribution). 2026. Journal of Peace Research 63 (2): 289-297.

Recent research has explored how militant leaders’ backgrounds shape their decision-making while in power. However, existing studies primarily focus on leaders of rebel groups participating in civil wars, overlooking smaller, yet lethal and influential, armed groups that operate outside civil war contexts. To address this gap, we introduce the Jihadist Leaders Dataset (JLD), which provides original, systematic data on the backgrounds and prewar experiences of 237 leaders from 110 jihadist organizations. The dataset covers organizations operating across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East between 1976 and 2023, capturing a broad range of actors that are central to contemporary conflicts. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, German, Turkish, and Urdu sources, we document biographical information on 31 leader-level variables, offering the potential for analyzing how jihadist leaders’ prior experiences shape their preferences and the behavior of the groups they command. We detail our data collection procedures and present descriptive statistics before illustrating the JLD’s utility through a quantitative analysis of the leader-level determinants of suicide bombings. The JLD advances research on militant leaders, jihadist actors, and the role of individual decision-makers in shaping conflict processes and provides multiple avenues for new research on leader-level explanations of various consequential outcomes in conflict zones, including organizational splintering, tactical choices, and militant alliances.

Gender in International Bureacracies: Evidence from UN Field Missions with Katharina P. Coleman, Kseniya Oksamytna, and Jessica Di Salvatore. 2025. International Studies Quarterly 69 (4).

Contemporary international organizations, including the UN, employ tens of thousands of staff outside of their headquarters in field offices around the world. Despite attempts to promote gender equity, significant differences persist in male and female officials’ experiences of working in UN field offices and missions. Drawing on a series of internal surveys of UN field staff, we demonstrate that, relative to men, women report having worse relationships with peers, supervisors, and management as well as having less confidence in performance appraisal mechanisms. Through a qualitative analysis of survey comments, archival materials, and semi-structured interviews, we highlight distinct gendered dynamics of working in field offices that affect international bureaucrats’ workplace experiences.

Working Papers

Political Economy of Armed Groups

Adaptive Extraction: Armed Group Governance in Syria – Under Review

Civil wars are long. Armed groups need revenue to sustain their operations long-term, but we do not understand how they set or change their mix of funding strategies. Existing theory predicts that groups with resources loot to replace lost resource rents or that taxation is ideologically motivated and relatively constant across group territory. Empirically, groups with resources also create institutions and tax, and taxation varies across space. I argue that if revenue from one source declines armed groups will dynamically substitute one funding strategy for another. I test this prediction using a negative oil-price shock in a quasi-experimental design to examine how the Islamic State adapted to declining resource rents. I find that the group levied new, administratively costly taxes as a substitute for lost oil revenue. In contrast, looting did not increase. This demonstrates how groups shift the mix of funding strategies they pursue in response to the strategic environment, and that groups have preferences between different revenue sources.

International Organizations, Aid, and Foreign Policy

Ambassadors and Field-Level Diplomacy: French Missions in Africa (1960–1996) with Haley Swedlund, Michal Mochtak, and Nada Afa – Under Review

Does the scope for discretion for ambassadors vary across substantive issue areas? In this article, we examine how the informational and organizational conditions of different issue areas shape the discretion of field-level diplomats vis-`a-vis their principals. Using original data from the French diplomatic archives, we analyze end-of-mission reports from French missions across Africa across more than three decades, comparing how ambassadors write about economic issues, security concerns, and French cultural programs. We use large language models to classify paragraphs by type before ranking them along three dimensions with a novel tournament design and a Bradley-Terry model that assigns latent scores for formality, neutrality, and precision to over 14,000 paragraphs of interest. We show that ambassadors vary their linguistic style and emphasis across issue areas within the same reports, indicating that professional discretion is not uniform but issue dependent. Economic reporting, which headquarters can most readily standardize and verify, is the most formal, neutral, and precise. Cultural and security reporting, both of which depend on locally grounded judgment, are markedly less so and produce stronger between-ambassador effects. Discretion, we argue, is shaped less by how much principals care about an issue than by how far effective reporting on it requires judgment that headquarters can neither substitute nor evaluate.

When are Aid Suspension Threats Credible? Evidence from a Global Elite Survey with Haley Swedlund, Samantha Custer, and Ana Horigoshi – Under Review

When coercive threats are effective, there may be no punishment to observe. As a result, observed sanctions tell us relatively little about when targets expect senders to follow-through with threats. Aid suspensions are a useful setting for studying this problem because donors control the threatened resource, yet recipients may still doubt whether they will bear the costs of withholding it. In this article, we test theory on when aid suspension threats are perceived as credible using an original survey experiment with 1,455 global elites working in international development and related fields; 89% of our sample are citizens of aid-receiving countries. We find that the type of transgression strongly influences perceived credibility. Threats following military coups or embezzlement are viewed as far more credible than threats related to election irregularities or human rights abuses. In contrast, prior beliefs about aid, prior exposure to aid suspensions, and recipient access to alternative funding from China do not affect the perceived credibility of aid suspensions, but do shape personal support for aid suspensions. These findings shift attention from donor decisions about when to suspend aid to recipient expectations about when enforcement is likely.

Work in Progress

The Targeting of Civilian Infrastructure and Rebel Governance with Regine Schwab – Revising for Submission

Civilians are frequent targets in armed conflicts. However, the literature on violence against civilians focuses primarily on direct civilian casualties and overlooks a broader analytically-distinct phenomenon: the targeting of civilian infrastructure. We argue that attacks on the built environment enabling the provision of healthcare, energy, water, food, education, and the movement of goods and people are not simply a variant of violence against civilians but a distinct strategy that exploits the dual-use nature of such infrastructure to target civilians and enemy belligerents simultaneously. Because rebels and the civilian population they operate among frequently draw on the same wells, clinics, and markets, attacking this infrastructure lets perpetrators pursue punishment and denial at once; undermining civilian welfare while degrading rebels’ capacity to feed, fund, recover, and ultimately fight. We expect rebel groups to military respond to infrastructure attacks, and we test our argument with a difference-in-differences design using data on the targeting of civilian infrastructure in the Syrian civil war. We find that rebels respond quickly proximate to infrastructure strikes, but that groups which govern do not respond more than groups that do not govern. However, governing groups respond differently, exhibiting greater military capacity.

Under the Veil of Secrecy: Racism and Paternalism in French Diplomatic Reporting with Haley Sedlund and Michal Mochtak – Registered Report Drafted

We analyze the persistence of colonial, racist, and paternalistic language in French diplomatic writing over more than 50 years. Our goal is to examine the prevalence of such language in French diplomatic reporting over time, across contexts, and among individual ambassadors. To achieve this, we examine all end-of-mission reports written by French ambassadors stationed in four regions — Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, and Asia and Southeast Asia — between 1945 and the mid-1990s using computational text analysis. Unlike prior approaches to identifying racist sentiment in especially social media data, we propose using a randomized tournament setup based on pairwise comparisons of short text sentiments. This setup allows us to better capture the nuanced power dynamics inherent in diplomatic writing. We analyze our hypotheses in a series of linear models to parse the effects of time trends, local context, and individual ambassadors.

Leader Backgrounds and Rebel Social Services with Ilayda B. Onder, Mark Berlin, and Muge Acarlar – Revising for Submission

Previous research has shown that jihadist insurgent groups are more likely than their secular counterparts to provide social services to civilians. Yet service provision varies widely within this ideological family. Some organizations build schools and clinics while others never do, and the same organization’s provision changes over time. Stable organizational attributes such as ideology, territorial control, and resources fall short of explaining this variation. We advance a leader-centered explanation. Leaders govern with the repertoires they acquire before taking power. Specifically, leaders whose civilian careers were spent in governance-related professions (e.g., education, religious instruction and adjudication, medicine, public administration, politics) bring beliefs, skills, and social networks that make service provision feasible and valuable. In contrast, leaders who spent time in direct combat bring repertoires oriented toward discipline, security, and coercion, in which services for civilians are peripheral. We therefore expect organizations to become more likely to provide services after governance-background leaders assume power, and less likely after combat-experienced leaders do. We test these expectations using original data on the backgrounds of 237 leaders of 110 jihadist organizations operating across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East between 1976 and 2023, combined with new data on these organizations’ provision of healthcare and education. Staggered difference-in-differences estimates support both expectations, and matched-sample analyses address the possibility that particular organizations select particular kinds of leaders. This study enhances our understanding of rebel governance by shifting the explanatory focus from what armed organizations are to who leads them.