Research

Under Review

“Armed Group Taxation and Adaptation: Evidence from Syria” – Under Review

Civil wars are long with the the median ongoing insurgency lasting ten years. Armed groups need revenue to sustain their operations long-term and fiscal shocks are inevitable over time, but we do not know how groups 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. I argue that armed groups with sufficient institutional capacity will raise taxes to substitute for lost resource revenue. I test this theory by leveraging a negative oil-price shock and using a difference-in-differences design to examine how the Islamic State adapted to declining resource rents. I find that the group diversified its extraction practices by levying new taxes to recoup lost revenue. The group responded dynamically to a shift in the strategic environment by investing in administratively costly taxes, deepening our understanding of rebel governance.

Presented at Polmeth, JSQC, and the US Military Academy.

“Changing the Guard: Rebel Leadership Transitions in Syria” – Under Review

Over 90 percent of armed groups possess a clear central command that exerts control over the group’s constituent parts, but there is conflicting evidence regarding whether group leaders can independently influence group behavior and conflict dynamics. This paper tests the core assumption behind leadership targeting, which is that eliminating an armed group leader degrades the capability of the group. However, unlike prior studies of leadership targeting, the analysis extends beyond the group-level to examine the effect on the conflict overall. I use original data on assassination attempts of leaders for 15 armed groups in the Syrian conflict from 2011 to 2018, and by exploiting the as-if randomness of the success or failure of assassination attempts, I identify the causal effect of successful attacks. I demonstrate that assassinating leaders decreases the battlefield efficacy of the group, who suffer more casualties after losing their leader. However, while these attacks degrade individual groups, they do not reduce the level of violence in the Syrian civil war overall. I show that combatants defecting between groups drives higher levels of violence as fighters leave weakened groups for their stronger rivals, suggesting leadership targeting has limitations we have not currently theorized.

Presented at APSA, ISA, MPSA, CPSA, SWMMR, JSISE, and the Workshop on Conflict Dynamics.

“Gender in International Bureaucracies: Evidence From UN Field Missions” with Katharina Coleman, Jessica Di Salvatore and Kseniya Oksamytna (equal contribution) – R&R at International Studies Quarterly

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 research interviews, we argue that there are distinct gendered elements of working in field offices that affect international bureaucrats’ workplace experiences.

Presented at ISA.

Work in Progress

“Commanders of the Mujahideen: Introducing the Jihadist Leaders Dataset (JLD)” with Maria Amjad, Mark Berlin, Sara Daub and Ilayda B. Onder – Draft Complete

Recent research on political violence has explored how leaders’ backgrounds influence their decision-making while in power. However, existing scholarship primarily analyzes the biographical attributes of individuals at the helm of rebel organizations. We focus not only on large rebel organizations, but also on the leaders of smaller, highly lethal armed groups in civil wars as well as organizations operating outside of civil war contexts. With the Jihadist Leaders Dataset (JLD), we capture a broader sample of organizations with shared ideological characteristics. The dataset contains novel biographical information on 178 leaders of jihadist groups operating across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East from 1979 to 2023 using Arabic, English, French, German, Turkish, and Urdu language sources. These data include information specific to some jihadist groups, such as whether their leaders were trained in Afghanistan, which allows us to establish how networks shape the future behavior of armed group leaders. The first paper in this broader project outlines the JLD, compares it to other datasets, and demonstrates its practical value through an empirical study on group adoption of suicide bombings.

Presented at APSA and ISA.

“Diplomat Heterogeneity: Changing French Diplomacy in Africa” with Haley Swedlund and Nada Afa – Analyzing Data

Do diplomats stationed abroad systematically affect international politics? If so, under what conditions? There is increasing scholarly attention on whether field-level diplomats like ambassadors impact political and economic outcomes where they are stationed or whether state interests and institutional structures alone drive government behavior. We illustrate how the way diplomats understand and discuss their role has changed through time using over 6,500 pages of original data from the French diplomatic archives across African diplomatic missions from 1960 to 1996, supplemented by individual-level data on each ambassador. We argue that improving information technology, such as the 1973 introduction of electronic cables, allowed states to manage their diplomats’ activities more closely, which reduced individual-level systematic variation in diplomatic reports as well as the independence of field diplomats. We assess our theory using an embedding regression model, a natural language processing technique that allows us to train a model specific to our corpus of documents and estimate how word use varies across contexts and between subgroups. This research furthers our understanding of how individual diplomats systematically vary within one foreign ministry over time, while capturing broader shifts in French diplomatic practices over the same period.

“Rebel Leadership, Military Experience, and Leader Selection” – Revising for Submission

This paper assesses whether findings on the role of state leaders’ military and combat experience extend to armed groups. Through a cross-national analysis of armed group leaders, I demonstrate that leader selection practices, particularly whether a leader founded the group, condition the effect of a leader’s combat experience on group structure and attacks. The heterogenous effects of leader selection extend to published work on armed group leaders, highlighting the need to include selection processes in theories on the relationship between leaders and group behavior.

Presented at ISA, CPSA, and JSQC.