Research Areas

This line of research asks how regimes change, how governing institutions build or lose legitimacy in the eyes of the governed, and how societies hold power to account for past abuses. It covers transitional justice — the processes through which states pursue accountability, truth, and reparation after atrocity or authoritarian rule — and how law is used to manage, and sometimes manipulate, public memory of the past. A related strand examines how the institutions that distinguish democracies, including judicial independence, free and fair elections, and the separation between military and police, respond to pressures including polarization, war and other national emergencies, and autocratization.

Methods Original cross-national datasets · survey experiments and focus groups · archival and historical records

A long tradition in social science holds that war makes states, but that literature has focused on armies, taxation, and bureaucracies. My work examines the legal institutions—courts, codes, and police—through which wartime authorities govern, in two settings rarely studied together: a twenty-first-century insurgency in the Middle East and the nineteenth-century American capital. A second strand traces what happens after the fighting stops: how divided communities decide whether to punish or reintegrate those accused of collaboration, and how humanitarian assistance shapes reconstruction in fragile settings.

Methods Archival research · conjoint and survey experiments · household surveys in conflict-affected settings

This work concerns the conduct of war: how civilians judge the armed forces fighting around them, how international humanitarian law regulates—and fails to regulate—the use of military force, and what is owed to those harmed, whether symbolic, in the form of apologies and memorialization, or material, in the form of compensation and investment in reconstruction.

Methods Original datasets built from military strike reports · satellite imagery · conjoint experiments, interviews, and focus groups · field research in conflict-affected settings