Research
Book Project
The Civic Legacies of Wartime Social Orders
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Why does violence lead to increased participation in victimized communities in some cases but not in others in the post conflict period? Why is violence in some cases a collectivizing experience but an atomizing and individualizing one in others? My dissertation examines how the social orders that emerge during wars affect the political participation of war survivors and their descendants in the post-conflict era. Specifically, I argue that the degree of agency granted to civilians and the ideological content of these orders shape the continuity of civilian organization and the formation of collective identities that sustain postwar mobilization.
This research advances our understanding of the mechanisms linking past violence to present-day political participation. It empirically contributes to the literature on the legacies of violence by investigating the microsocial processes violence and governance and their effects on different patterns of postwar political participation. Using the case of indigenous communities in Guatemala that lived and survived a genocide in the 1980s and lived under varied regimes of wartime governance, I employ a natural experiment, archive work, interviews, focus groups and a survey to develop a theory of the political legacies of wartime social orders. The dissertation on which the book is based received the 2025 Gabriel A. Almond Award for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics by the American Political Science Association. Read the Award Committee's citation here. |
 Community Townhall in the indigenous community of Primavera del Ixcán, Guatemala 2022
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Peer-Reviewed Publications
Peace Scholarship and the Local Turn: Hierarchies in the Production of Knowledge about Peace (2022) Journal of Peace Research
(with Anna Johnson, Sehrazat Mart, Mark Robison and Caroline Hughes), 10.1177/00223433221088035
The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has focused attention on the importance of cultural resources available for peacemaking in ‘local’ conflict-affected contexts, and particularly in non-Western countries. Growing attention is now also paid to establishing whether the academic field of peace studies itself is inclusive of non-Western voices and perspectives. This article presents a new dataset of 4,318 journal articles on peace indexed in Web of Science between 2015 and 2018 to discover asymmetric patterns of publication and scholarly gatekeeping between higher-income and lower-income countries. Analysis of the data collected suggests that 15 years after the ‘local turn,’ higher-income countries continue to dominate the field across the domains of publishing institutions; scholarship about non-high-income countries; the conduct and focus of research collaborations; claims to theorization; and the discourse of the field. However, positive change is being driven by a proliferation of scholarship in upper-middle-income countries, characterized by intranational collaborations between scholars writing about their own countries in their own national journals.
The Political Legacies of Exile: How Inclusive Reception Policies Shape Refugee Long-Term Political Engagement Comparative Political Studies, 10.1177/00104140261448435
How do refugee experiences in receiving countries shape their long-term political behavior? This article argues that inclusive reception policies that grant refugees political and economic rights can foster civic engagement after return. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of Mayan indigenous Guatemalans to refugee settlements in 1980s Mexico, I find that inclusive hosting increased post-return participation in nonviolent protest by 25 percentage points. The analysis draws on archival sources, an original household survey of 379 returnees, and 48 semi- structured interviews conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in three Guatemalan return communities to probe four mechanisms plausibly driving this relationship: expectations of institutional responsiveness, increased political efficacy, strengthened organizational capacity, and peer learning. While most existing research focuses on the effects of refugees on host communities and determinants of return, this study examines how host reception policies influence refugee behavior after going home, with implications for post-conflict democratization and refugee policy worldwide.
Check out a three minute video summarizing the paper's argument here.
What Do Rebels Provide? How Social and Territorial Control Shape Rebel Governance in War - forthcoming at Civil Wars
(with Hannah Early-Bagdanov)
Scholarship on rebel governance has traditionally assumed that territorial control is necessary for governance, drawing on Olson’s ``stationary bandit” model. However, emerging research highlights that rebels may also govern if they possess social control, defined as rebels' imposition or co-optation of social relations, identities, networks, and/or ideologies to achieve their aims. While the literature has established that rebels govern in cases where they possess territorial and/or social control, we still know little about how different configurations of these forms of control shape the extent and nature of rebel governance. Thus, this article systematically investigates how the constellation of rebels' territorial and social control influences whether or not rebels choose to govern, and if they do, the extensiveness of their governance. Using a compiled dataset of 145 rebel groups from 1980 to 2011, we find that groups who possess both social and territorial control are most likely to govern, and will do so most extensively as compared to groups who possess only one or neither form of control. By empirically tracing how different constellations of social and territorial control result in different rebel governance outcomes, this study offers a nuanced account of how modes of control influence the types and breadth of governance activities rebels engage in during war.
(with Anna Johnson, Sehrazat Mart, Mark Robison and Caroline Hughes), 10.1177/00223433221088035
The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has focused attention on the importance of cultural resources available for peacemaking in ‘local’ conflict-affected contexts, and particularly in non-Western countries. Growing attention is now also paid to establishing whether the academic field of peace studies itself is inclusive of non-Western voices and perspectives. This article presents a new dataset of 4,318 journal articles on peace indexed in Web of Science between 2015 and 2018 to discover asymmetric patterns of publication and scholarly gatekeeping between higher-income and lower-income countries. Analysis of the data collected suggests that 15 years after the ‘local turn,’ higher-income countries continue to dominate the field across the domains of publishing institutions; scholarship about non-high-income countries; the conduct and focus of research collaborations; claims to theorization; and the discourse of the field. However, positive change is being driven by a proliferation of scholarship in upper-middle-income countries, characterized by intranational collaborations between scholars writing about their own countries in their own national journals.
The Political Legacies of Exile: How Inclusive Reception Policies Shape Refugee Long-Term Political Engagement Comparative Political Studies, 10.1177/00104140261448435
How do refugee experiences in receiving countries shape their long-term political behavior? This article argues that inclusive reception policies that grant refugees political and economic rights can foster civic engagement after return. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of Mayan indigenous Guatemalans to refugee settlements in 1980s Mexico, I find that inclusive hosting increased post-return participation in nonviolent protest by 25 percentage points. The analysis draws on archival sources, an original household survey of 379 returnees, and 48 semi- structured interviews conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in three Guatemalan return communities to probe four mechanisms plausibly driving this relationship: expectations of institutional responsiveness, increased political efficacy, strengthened organizational capacity, and peer learning. While most existing research focuses on the effects of refugees on host communities and determinants of return, this study examines how host reception policies influence refugee behavior after going home, with implications for post-conflict democratization and refugee policy worldwide.
Check out a three minute video summarizing the paper's argument here.
What Do Rebels Provide? How Social and Territorial Control Shape Rebel Governance in War - forthcoming at Civil Wars
(with Hannah Early-Bagdanov)
Scholarship on rebel governance has traditionally assumed that territorial control is necessary for governance, drawing on Olson’s ``stationary bandit” model. However, emerging research highlights that rebels may also govern if they possess social control, defined as rebels' imposition or co-optation of social relations, identities, networks, and/or ideologies to achieve their aims. While the literature has established that rebels govern in cases where they possess territorial and/or social control, we still know little about how different configurations of these forms of control shape the extent and nature of rebel governance. Thus, this article systematically investigates how the constellation of rebels' territorial and social control influences whether or not rebels choose to govern, and if they do, the extensiveness of their governance. Using a compiled dataset of 145 rebel groups from 1980 to 2011, we find that groups who possess both social and territorial control are most likely to govern, and will do so most extensively as compared to groups who possess only one or neither form of control. By empirically tracing how different constellations of social and territorial control result in different rebel governance outcomes, this study offers a nuanced account of how modes of control influence the types and breadth of governance activities rebels engage in during war.
Work Under Review
Human Rights or Criminals' Rights? Crime, Violence, and the Popular Delegitimization of Human Rights in Latin America
(With Regina Bateson) - draft available upon request
This paper examines the growing skepticism toward human rights in Latin America, particularly in the context of rising crime and insecurity. While the region has made significant strides in peacebuilding, democratization, and justice for past human rights violations, a troubling narrative has emerged that frames human rights as protections primarily for criminals rather than victims. We analyze this critique, which has circulated widely since the 1990s, and argue that it reflects a broader historical effort by states to undermine the concept of human rights. Using survey experiments, we show that exposure to crime-related concerns reduces public support for human rights, suggesting that fear of crime can actively erode confidence in these protections. Further, in-depth interviews reveal that this criticism is often driven by a perception that the rights and security of victims are neglected, a phenomenon we call "relative security deprivation." Finally, we propose policy interventions aimed at addressing this imbalance, fostering greater public trust in human rights, and strengthening democratic institutions in the face of widespread criminal violence.
Criminal El Dorado: How the Resource Boom Shaped Organized Crime in Latin America
(With Moises Arce and Omayra Peña-Jimenez) - draft available upon request
The 2000s commodity boom in Latin America expanded natural resource exports and labor markets, with regulatory frameworks shaping market dynamics and determining winners and losers. While some countries protected small-scale producers, others prioritized transnational capital, creating enforcement gaps that allowed criminal organizations to infiltrate the extractive sector. This paper examines how natural resource prices, institutional regulations, and governance structures influenced criminal activity in Peru, Guatemala, and Colombia. It argues that variation in criminal governance is shaped by the interaction between regulatory frameworks—whether they favored transnational corporations or small-scale producers—and the controllability of the value chain. Using a mixed-methods approach, including fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the study highlights how weak institutional enforcement fosters informal regulation by criminal groups.The paper contributes to understanding the relationship between economic shifts, market regulation, and illicit activities, offering insights into the implications for violence, environmental protection, and community displacement across different extractive industries.
A cause without rebels or rebels without a cause? Trajectories of Post-Conflict Remobilization in Guatemala and Colombia
(With José Gutierrez Danton and Nina Caspersen) - draft available upon request
What explains remobilization of rebel combatants in post-conflict settings? And why do (former) rebels remobilize in some cases but not others? The literature on combatant remobilization usually focuses on the motivations internal to armed organizations and the shape of the demobilization process. However, we know that rebel groups are often deeply embedded with the local populations over which they de facto rule and that they sometimes build extensive governance infrastructure. After the end of conflict, these strong rebel-civilian interpersonal connections and civilian expectations regarding rebel provision of security shape the bottom-up demand for rebel remobilization. This paper proposes a relational approach to rebel remobilization. Although rebels do have organizational incentives to remobilize and that the demobilization process provides the background against which rebels judge incentives to remobilize, civilian demands for rebel security provision are an overlooked motivation for rebel remobilization. This article proposes that combatant remobilization responds to two main incentives: the demand for governance by local communities that previously lived under rebel rule, and the possibilities by/incentives for the group to supply governance.
Work in Progress
The Economic Foundations of Illicit Power: DTO Strategies and Their Political Consequences in Guatemala
(With Diego Romero)
The Bukele Effect: The Transnational Spread of State Repression in Latin America
(With Regina Bateson and Natalie Chaudhuri)
An Integrated Approach to Subnational Research: From Design Elements to Theory Refinement
(With Gonzalo Contreras, Javier Pérez-Sandoval, and Eugenia Aguirre)
Book Reviews
Omar Sanchez-Sibony (ed.). State-Society Relations in Guatemala: Theory and Practice. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023. Latin American Politics and Society. 10.1017/lap.2024.33
