Research

Targets and Territories Dissertation

Dissertation project · defense targeted for December 2027

My dissertation develops a theory of rebel violence during elections. I argue that the way armed groups depend on civilian audiences, together with whether their electoral aims are process-directed or outcome-directed, shapes the form that violence takes. The argument yields a typology of four strategies, distinguishing disruption, decapitation, devastation, and suppression.

The project pairs large-N models drawn from ACLED, ECAV, and the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset with structured case comparisons, including Boko Haram in Nigeria and RENAMO in Mozambique. The case analysis proceeds through secondary-source process tracing built on the BAAD and DECO data collections.

When Do Social Movements Persist? Working paper

Prepared for the American Political Science Association meeting

This paper asks why some social movement organizations endure while others collapse. I propose an anchored brokerage framework, which holds that persistence depends jointly on an organization’s embeddedness within its own social base and on its brokerage across cleavage lines. The analysis draws on the ARC 2.0 dataset, covering 913 resistance organizations across 42 countries, and estimates negative binomial models of organizational survival.

Party Institutionalization Co-authored

In progress · building on work presented at the Southern Political Science Association

A co-authored project extending earlier conference work on the institutionalization of political parties. Further details will be posted as the paper develops.

Methodological interests

My applied work centers on the quantitative study of conflict and contention. This includes probit and negative binomial models, survival and mixed-effects methods, endogeneity correction, and selection models, alongside the construction and integration of large event-data pipelines in R.