Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

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

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 pre-war experiences of 238 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.

Gender in International Bureacracies: Evidence from UN Field Missions with Katharina Coleman, Kseniya Oksamytna, and Jessica Di Salvatore. International Studies Quarterly. Forthcoming.

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.

Links: Working Paper

Working Papers

Armed Group Leaders

Changing the Guard: Rebel Leadership Transitions in Syria – R&R at International Interactions

This paper examines how leadership targeting affects the violent conduct of armed groups during civil war. 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. I test whether leadership change affects the battlefield efficacy of armed groups using original data on assassination attempts of armed group leaders during the Syrian civil war. I exploit the as-if randomness of the success or failure of assassination attempts as a quasi-experiment to identify the causal effect of rebel leadership targeting on armed group violence. I find that successful assassination attempts result in greater battlefield losses for armed groups. Importantly, successful attempts degrade groups and reduce 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.

Leadership Succession and Militant Extra-Lethal Violence with Mark Berlin and Ilayda B. Onder – Under Review

Why do armed groups use extreme forms of violence such as beheadings, despite their significant costs? This study argues that leadership transitions create authority crises that incentivize successors to adopt extra-lethal violence as a tool of internal consolidation and external signaling. These pressures are particularly acute for successors with prior leadership experience in other armed groups: having previously lost power, these leaders face additional reputational deficits and are especially likely to view extra-lethal violence as a useful instrument of authority consolidation. Drawing on an original dataset of 206 leaders from 108 jihadist groups active between 1976 and 2023, we find that organizations are significantly more likely to use beheadings under successor leaders than under founders. This effect is most pronounced among those with prior rebel leadership experience. We also find that these patterns are more consistent with successors’ strategic use of beheadings to address short-term authority deficits than with alternative explanations such as ideological extremism, technical skill, transnational network ties, or unsanctioned violence by subordinates. By shifting attention from organizational incentives to leader-level dynamics, this study contributes to research on militant leadership, succession in armed groups, and the strategic logic of extra-lethal violence.

Political Economy of Armed Groups

Armed Group Adaptive Extraction: Evidence from 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.

Armed Group Extraction Strategies – Under Review at Civil Wars (Special Issue)

Armed groups require revenue. Groups use a variety of extraction strategies to generate revenue including resource rents, foreign support, smuggling, taxation, and looting. These strategies are often examined in isolation and some existing theory posits that reliance on resource rents precludes groups from developing governance institutions, including tax practices. However, 25 percent of groups use multiple extraction strategies simultaneously, and, empirically, some groups extract both resources and taxes. I argue groups operate in a governance equilibrium and choose the mix of strategies they use based on what will deliver the highest net marginal value. I assess my argument descriptively using a cross-national quantitative design. I find that armed groups use a mix of strategies and that, counterintuitively, extracting resource rents leads groups to increase taxation in the future. Additionally, nearly all the extraction strategies studied lead groups to deepen their governance practices, though significant heterogeneity remains.

International Organizations

Armed Aid? Conditions Shaping Cooperation with Armed Actors with Haley Swedlund and Marie-Eve Desrosiers – Under Review

Foreign aid organizations have long been known to be reluctant to work with armed actors for fear of undermining perceptions of neutrality and increasing risks to their staff. Yet, foreign aid is a critical lifeline for the more than two billion people living in conflict- affected countries. In such contexts, the surrounding instability means that aid actors regularly encounter armed actors such as national military and police forces, international peacekeeping forces, and local armed groups and paramilitaries. When are aid workers willing to work with security actors such as national armies, militia groups, and international peacekeeping forces? In this article, we theorize that engagement with armed actors is not just about normative principles but about concrete realities on the ground. We hypothesize that three key factors influence aid practitioners’ willingness to work with armed actors: the type of armed actor involved, whether cooperation is visible or not, and aid workers’ relative proximity to conflict. We test our hypotheses using semi-structured interviews of aid practitioners in Kinshasa (N=66) and a survey of primarily Congolese aid workers in three conflict-affected provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (N=132). Our data shows that the type of armed actor is a significant factor in the willingness to cooperate, but visibility is not as crucial as anticipated. We also find compelling evidence that the barriers to working with even the most controversial armed actors soften in spaces where conflict and instability are most proximate.

Work in Progress

Diplomat Heterogeneity: Changing French Diplomacy in Africa with Haley Swedlund and Nada Afa – Revising for Special Issue Submission

States post field-level diplomats all over the world, investing in their recruitment and training, facilities, and in monitoring their activities. However, despite growing academic attention to whether and how foreign policy elites influence political and economic outcomes, little is known about the impact of field-level diplomats. Under what conditions do field-level diplomats have influence and when are they constrained? We examine this question by studying private, diplomatic reporting. One of the primary ways field-level diplomats exercise their individual agency and influence international politics is through their reporting to central governments. Via their reporting, diplomats can shape how their host country is portrayed in the sending government’s foreign policy discussions by, for example, strategically selecting what to highlight or using particular language to describe key events.

We argue that diplomats have more individual agency in contexts where there is less central government oversight and issues are less clearly defined. Using a principal-agent framework, we theorize that when central government communication is more costly they focus on some priority areas over others, creating variation in oversight of different issue areas. We analyze this relationship using over 6,500 pages of end-of-mission reports written by French diplomats from missions across Africa from 1960 to 1996. These end-of-mission reports are written by French ambassadors at the end of their tenure and reflect their personal observations on their time in the country. Ambassadors are specifically asked to structure their analysis according to three key foreign policy areas, economic policy, security policy, and cultural policy, but are given wide latitude in how they discuss these issues. Importantly, these are confidential foreign policy documents intended for internal use.

We analyze how these documents vary in two key ways: First, using a supervised learning, natural language processing model combined with these archival data and individual-level data on ambassadorial postings, we assess within end-of-mission report variation by foreign policy priority. This helps explain individual-level variation across issue areas and highlights how cultural policy, which is less precisely defined than security policy, allows for more diplomatic agency. Second, we examine whether changing communications technology reduces the monitoring costs of governments, the principals, to oversee and provide instructions to their agents, field-diplomats. As the cost of communication decreased due to the introduction of the electronic cable, central governments could exercise more oversight over more issue areas, reducing diplomats’ agency on trade and cultural issues. To identify the effect of electronic cables, we explore the change in matched reports written by the same ambassador before and after the technology shock.

The Politics of Foreign Aid Conditionality: Experimental Evidence on Elite Beliefs About Aid Suspension with Haley Swedlund, Samantha Custer, and Ana Horigoshi – Pre-analysis Plan Registered, Revising for Submission

Foreign aid donors frequently threaten to suspend foreign aid in response to allegations of human rights violations, fiscal mismanagement, etc. For these threats to be effective, recipients have to believe that donors will actually suspend foreign aid. It is, however, empirically difficult to study aid suspensions. With this in mind, we use survey experiments with a unique sample of global elites from 145 countries to explore the question: when do global elites believe aid suspensions are more or less likely?

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

The strategic consequences of wartime civilian harm continue to be debated. However, the literature has focused primarily on direct civilian targeting. How do government attacks on civilian infrastructure, such as food and healthcare provision, impact rebel behavior? And are there differences between rebels who govern civilians and those who do not? We develop a theory explaining how governing rebel groups respond to government targeting of civilian infrastructure. Following such attacks, governing rebels should be more likely to escalate their fighting activities than non-governing rebels. We argue that this is explained by the fact that governing groups face higher costs from the people they govern for not responding to infrastructure attacks. The argument is tested quantitatively with a difference-in-differences design using new data on the targeting of civilian infrastructure and rebel governance in the Syrian civil war. We find that armed groups that govern respond with more violence than groups which do not govern to strikes against hospitals. The results have important implications for the effects of state-led violence and the strength of legal norms protecting noncombatants.

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.