Embedded Files
Job Market Paper
Displacement as State-Building: Mobile Phone Evidence from the Taliban's Return to Power
Displacement as State-Building: Mobile Phone Evidence from the Taliban's Return to Power
Summary: How do rebels build states after civil war? At the end of civil wars, victorious rebels must extend their authority into hostile territories that hold both threats of renewed rebellion and resources vital for state-building. Because repression can disrupt production, consolidation strategies must balance political control with economic viability. In this paper, I argue that forced displacement is central to this process: rebel regimes strategically expel dissidents to neutralize threats and redistribute resources, but limit removals where labor is essential, even when populations are hostile. I test this argument in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Using the universe of user-level cellphone metadata generated when over 7 million users engage with the country's largest telecommunications network, I construct a novel dataset of weekly district-to-district migration flows between 2018 and 2022, providing the first uninterrupted, high-frequency account of internal displacement across wartime and postwar periods. I find that regime formation led to a 12-18% increase in out-migration from strongholds of the opposing forces relative to contested districts. In economically strategic enemy strongholds, outflows increased by over 25% on average, with displacement in high-value agricultural zones varying across the harvest cycle, suggesting the Taliban delayed evictions to avoid destroying vital food crops. Finally, I show that migration from enemy strongholds of high-value to lower-value districts rose significantly, consistent with a strategy of both threat neutralization and resource redistribution.
Publications and Working Papers
Territorial Control in Civil Wars (R&R at World Politics)
Territorial Control in Civil Wars (R&R at World Politics)
With Christopher W. Blair, Igor Kolesnikov and Austin L. Wright.
Abstract: Modern and historical conflicts are often defined by competition over territory. In civil wars, belligerent parties prioritize seizing land and natural resources, and influencing populations that reside within contested spaces. Because territorial control shapes critical conflict processes, it is a topic of paramount importance for scholars of conflict across social scientific disciplines and political science subfields. In this review article we survey five recent books that have reinvigorated the academic study of territorial control during civil wars. Each of the texts we review shares a common theme: how the fight to establish control shapes the course of war. We highlight the major theoretical and empirical contributions of the books we review, and synthesize their various contributions to theory and measurement. We characterize three generations of thinking about control in the extant literature, trace the evolution of thought across these waves, and underscore key theoretical and empirical developments of each generation. We argue the books we discuss represent an exciting, third wave of research on territorial control. To guide future work, we review the innovations of each advance in the study of territorial control, emphasizing the theoretical and empirical challenges that remain to be addressed.
with Cynthia Dwark, Gary King, Conlan Olson and Manish Raghavan
Abstract: To meet its dual burdens of providing useful statistics and ensuring privacy of individual respondents, the US Census Bureau has for decades introduced some form of ``noise'' into published statistics, initially through a method known as ``swapping'' (1990--2010), and then, for the first time in 2020, via an algorithm ensuring a form of Differential Privacy. While the TopDown algorithm used in 2020 has been made public, prior swapping approaches have not, in part to preserve the confidentiality of respondent data. The Bureau has not published (even a synthetic) ``original'' dataset and its swapped version, and it has kept secret many details of the swapping methodology deployed. It is therefore difficult to evaluate the effects of swapping, and to compare swapping to other privacy technologies. To address these difficulties we describe and implement a parameterized swapping algorithm based on Census publications and court documents. With this implementation, we characterize the impacts of swapping on a range of statistical quantities of interest. We provide intuition for the types of shifts induced by swapping and compare against techniques that use differential privacy. We find that while swapping may introduce errors of a similar magnitude to differential privacy, the direction in which statistics are biased need not be the same across the two techniques. More broadly, our implementation provides researchers with the tools to analyze and potentially correct for the impacts of disclosure avoidance systems on the quantities they study.
Selected Works in Progress
Securing Property Rights as a Tool for Equitable Peacebuilding: Evidence from Colombia's Lend Tenure Formalization and Restitution Efforts. with Christopher W. Blair and Austin L. Wright.
How effective is the formalization of property rights as a strategy for ending conflict? While existing research links land tenure insecurity to the onset and recurrence of violence, less is known about whether securing land rights can promote durable peace. We address this gap by analyzing Colombia’s national land tenure formalization and restitution program. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design based on a violence threshold that determined municipal eligibility, we estimate the effects of policies granting secure titles to displaced migrants and at-risk informal rural landholders on household-level conflict and development outcomes. We further examine whether the program’s staggered introduction of initiatives to support women’s land formalization altered patterns of violence, access to financial services, labor force composition, and health and mortality outcomes.
The Politics of Cartel Competition: Evidence from the Mexican Drug War
When do Drug Trafficking Organizations cooperate to maintain peace? This project examines why drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes sustain peaceful coexistence and at other times engage in violent competition, with an empirical focus on the Mexican Drug War. Prevailing accounts treat DTOs as profit-driven firms that compete through violence, yet violence levels differ sharply across regions. Some areas face persistent inter-cartel violence, while others maintain long-term coexistence among rival groups. I develop a formal model, drawing on rationalist theories of war, that links the decision to use violence to features of the local economy. A key factor is how sensitive market demand is to violence. When demand falls sharply in response to violence, such as in tourism-dependent economies, DTOs have incentives to avoid conflict to protect their profits. The model explains why cooperation can emerge in some illicit markets and identifies the economic conditions that make peace more profitable than violence during internal conflict.
Policy Writing
There's a Better Way for Mexico to Elect its Judges
There's a Better Way for Mexico to Elect its Judges
with Andrew O'Donohue
Foreign Policy, September 16, 2024
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