Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (55)
Working Paper
pdf
This paper leverages a novel panel dataset covering the histories of 306 chiefs and 256 episodes of village governance and taxation by armed groups in 106 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to analyse the relationship between the governance of armed groups and the power of...
Working Paper
pdf
– Challenges and lessons from Ukraine
Collecting public opinion data is challenging in the shadow of war. And yet accurate public opinion is crucial. Political elites rely on it and often attempt to influence it. Therefore, it is incumbent on researchers to provide independent and reliable wartime polls. However, surveying in wartime...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border separating...
Working Paper
pdf
We analyse how inward foreign direct investment (FDI) received amid ongoing violence shapes armed conflict. We argue that FDI affects patterns of violence by influencing the state’s counterinsurgency strategy. To prevent disinvestment, governments strive to capture territory linked to investment...
Working Paper
pdf
Violent conflicts affect the lives and livelihoods of almost one quarter of the world’s population. But the effects of violent conflict are not uniform. This study assesses the differential effects of violent conflict on young people’s education, job prospects, and forms of civic engagement and...
Working Paper
pdf
We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an in-person survey to nearly 3,000 urban youths...
Working Paper
pdf
We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in legislator religion generated by the results of close...
Working Paper
pdf
Aid is still an important feature of the development landscape. Fragile states, in particular, have the greatest development needs but due to their poor governance they are the least likely countries to use aid effectively to meet their development challenges. In this paper, we explore which fragile...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper sheds light on the complex recovery governance in Ukraine by providing a snapshot of the evolving national recovery actors’ networks and examining them within a multi-level governance framework, using interviews, social network analysis, and a sense-making workshop. It highlights the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Experimental evidence from a video intervention in Rwanda
This paper investigates the causal impact of a randomized video intervention designed to study the determinants of parental time investments in early childhood among low-income parents. We designed and screened a video that provided information and conveyed persuasive messages about the importance...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from South Africa
How do states rebuild nations after a major conflict? Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have emerged as one of the most common interventions to achieve this objective. Despite their popularity, little is known about their efficacy to foster reconciliation and nation building. We fill this...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from the United Kingdom’s age of austerity
This paper studies the effect of austerity on forms of political participation—including voting, appealing for reform, and peaceful protesting—and the role of preferences for redistribution in shaping the relationship between individual exposure to austerity and political participation. The paper...
Working Paper
pdf
– COVID-19 and climate change
Terrorist and other types of armed groups often exploit natural and human-made disasters and emergencies to advance their causes. This paper studies how some armed groups have responded to two recent global emergencies—climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines the messaging and actions...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from the 2019 uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq
Scholarly logic holds that revolutionary movements are unlikely to break out in democracies, where citizens may simply remove unpopular leaders through elections. And yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a global series of uprisings against regimes that are nominally democratic—in that they...
Working Paper
pdf
– How assimilative primary school education affects insurgency in areas of ethnic conflict
Education is a public service, assumed to be highly valued by citizens, allowing politicians to use it to reward their co-ethnics. However, nation-states have also used education to create loyal citizens, leaving politicians in times of heightened threat of ethnic mobilization. This study...
Working Paper
pdf
– How local communities in Italy keep anti-fascist sentiments alive
Can past wartime experiences other than violence have long-term effects on political attitudes and behaviours? How are these legacies sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war?We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were forged...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks.Combining a historical border that...
Working Paper
pdf
While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using a regression discontinuity in time approach. We...
Working Paper
pdf
– Neofascist political violence in Italy, 1969–88
We still have limited knowledge about the long-term effects of fascism on European democracies. European countries experienced cycles of violence between the 1960s and 1980s. Can such violence be explained by legacies of mobilization during fascism? We study whether and how the Italian fascist...
Working Paper
pdf
– A controlled comparison of Rwanda and Burundi
I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country’s state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination—military victories and negotiated settlements—lead to differential long-run state-building outcomes and...
Working Paper
pdf
Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of methodologically exceptional studies has raised...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Italy
Under what conditions can legacies of past violence shape political behaviour? We propose a theory of how war victimization defines attitudes over the long run, and how these can be activated by changes in the political environment. We argue that exposure to violence by members of a different ethnic...
Working Paper
pdf
In this study, we investigate the relationship between education reform, institutional legacies of inequality, and changing political institutions in a poor, conflict-affected country. Burundi experienced a dramatic change in ethnic power relations after the 1993–2005 civil war. The post-war...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper explores the legacies of wartime rebel governance and counterinsurgency tactics. Insurgents rely on civilian support for resources, information, and cover. To defeat insurgents, the state attempts to extract information from communities where support for insurgents is highest. We argue...
Working Paper
pdf
– Insights from the Ethiopian and Somali civil wars
What distinguishes post-war governments that succeed in establishing a stable political order and prevent recurring conflict from those that do not? This comparative study considers the specific threats that typically lead to the collapse of the post-conflict political order to offer new hypotheses...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from forced resettlement in Zimbabwe
How does wartime victimization shape victims’ political attitudes in the long run? We argue that violence increases politics’ salience to victimized communities, which in turn increases these communities’ political awareness and evaluation of governance quality decades after war has ended. We...
Working Paper
pdf
– The role of oil theft and narcocracy and the electoral consequences of organized crime
When does organized crime resort to assassinating politicians? In narcocracies, criminal groups co-opt political elites through bribery in exchange for protection to traffic illegal drugs. When criminal groups compete, they may also resort to political violence to influence which candidate wins...
Working Paper
pdf
In this paper we examine the legacies on civil society of routine repressive activities carried out by authoritarian regimes, such as the targeting of opposition organizations. We focus on participation in voluntary associations in post-authoritarian Spain. We hypothesize that while repression...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper studies the unintended long-run effects of a permanent agricultural shock led by agro-terrorism in Brazil on the education and labour market. We explore the witches' broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the world's second most important cocoa production region until 1989, the southeast of...
Working Paper
pdf
Why do people support—or refrain from supporting—nonviolent protests for political change? The literature offers different answers to this question, but one variable that has received little attention is fears of protest unleashing violent conflict. This is surprising given that protest movements...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper presents evidence of political legacies of exposure to a violent class conflict over 100 years. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century period between the World Wars. The electoral...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Nazi repression of Catholic priests
A burgeoning literature on repression against civilians argues that exposure to violence changes victims’ identities by strengthening attachment to the in-group and creates downstream effects for political and social behaviour that persist across generations. In this paper, we ask whether selective...
Displaying 32 of 55 results