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My primary research interest is understanding how changes in violent non-state actors' financial capacity affect their interactions with the state, civilians, and competitors. I focus on the micro-level implications of shifts in rebel and criminal actors' capacity, contributing to previous work on natural resources in conflict, local governance in civil war, and competition between violent groups. My work makes use of a variety of quantitative methodologies and formal modeling.
Publications
Rebel Commodity Markets, Price Shocks, and Supplier Victimization
International Studies Quarterly
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Rebel organizations often benefit from the sale of primary commodities. However, producing these commodities may require labor from noncombatants. Rebels provide security and payment to civilian suppliers, but their ability to do so depends on consistent profits. How, then, do price shocks to labor intensive primary commodities undermine rebel-supplier relationships? I hypothesize that negative commodity price shocks lead cash-strapped rebels to ensure suppliers' loyalty by substituting coercion for positive incentives. Conversely, states seek to limit rapid increases in rebels' profit while avoiding the reputational costs of civilian victimization. Thus, victimization of rebel suppliers from groups such as pro-government paramilitaries is hypothesized to increase after positive commodity price shocks. I test these hypotheses with a new dataset covering 1999-2007 that combines monthly U.S. STRIDE data on cocaine price with municipal-level data from the Colombian Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica about the FARC and paramilitary groups' use of civilian victimization.
Pro-Government Militias and Civil War Termination (with Lindsay Reid)
Conflict Management and Peace Science
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Why do governments choose to fund pro-government militias if doing so could extend costly civil conflict? While PGMs are active in a majority of civil wars, their impact on conflict termination remains poorly understood. We argue that states fund PGMs to influence the course of conflict and its termination, hypothesizing that PGMs' impact on conflict outcomes is conditional on whether they are government-funded. Government-funded PGMs help states avoid costly negotiations and encourage rebellions’ gradual dissolution. Using competing risks analyses on civil wars that ended between the years 1981 and 2007, we find robust support for PGMs’ effects on conflict outcomes.
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Banditry or Business? Rebel Labor Markets and State Economic Intervention
International Interactions
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Stationary banditry is ubiquitous in civil war, with some rebel groups even investing in and profiting from primary commodities for years or decades. But for many of these groups, labor is a necessary component of resource production, such that laborers' economic participation is vital for rebel funding and survival. States, meanwhile, are eager to prevent rebels from establishing these economic footholds. In areas where rebels can assert control of primary commodity markets, military competition between states and rebels may be supplemented by economic competition over laborers' efforts. Under what conditions do governments wage local economic war by providing incentives to laborers to minimize the appeal of economically partnering with rebels? I argue that laborers' economic loyalty is a central and under-considered component to resource-driven conflicts. When rebels seek to establish stationary banditry, states incentivize laborers to participate in the legal economy rather than rebel-controlled markets. Specifically, states will pursue economic counterinsurgency policies in areas where rebels are most likely to profit from labor-intensive primary commodities. I find support for this argument using municipal-level Colombian data about the FARC's involvement in the coca trade and government provision of agricultural credits.
Civilian Self-Defense Militias in Civil War (with Lucia Bird, Kaisa Hinkkainen, and Navin Bapat)
International Interactions
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To mitigate the costs associated with suppressing rebellion, states may rely on civilian self-defense militias to protect their territory from rebel groups. However, this decision is also costly, given that these self-defense groups may undermine control of its territory. This raises the question: why do governments cultivate self-defense militias when doing so risks that these militias will undermine their territorial control? Using a game theoretic model, we argue that states take this risk in order to prevent rebels from co-opting local populations, which in turn may shift power away from the government and toward the rebels. Governments strategically use civilian militias to raise the price rebels must pay for civilian cooperation, prevent rebels from harnessing a territory's resources, and/or to deter rebels from challenging government control in key areas. Empirically, the model suggests states are likely to support the formation of self-defense militias in territory that may moderately improve the power of rebel groups, but not in areas that are either less valuable or areas that are critical to the government's survival. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Colombian civil war from 1996 to 2008.
Under Review
From Cocaine to Avocados: Criminal Market Expansion and Violence (with Lucía Tiscornia)
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Most of what we know about organized criminal violence comes from research about illicit narcotics markets. Yet, these groups also fight to capture markets for licit commodities, as evidenced by Sicilian lemons and South African abalone. When do criminal groups violently expand into markets for licit goods? We argue that rapid increases in the share of a good’s export value create opportunities for immediate profit and future market manipulation. This provokes violence as groups expand their territorial holdings and economic portfolio. We test our argument cross-nationally using the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and UNODC. Increases in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods are associated with more homicides– but only where criminal groups are present. We then provide subnational evidence of our mechanism using data on avocado exports from Mexico, and address reverse causality with Google Trends data about the popularity of avocado toast searches.