Summary: Civil war termination is often followed by overwhelming waves of forced displacement. While conventional wisdom would indicate that this large-scale population movement is a byproduct of violence and economic hardship evidence shows that forced displacement is employed strategically during war (Lichtenheld, 2020; Steele, 2018).In this paper I argue that waves of forced displacement that follow civil war termination are, in part, a consequence of the state’s strategic actions. Specifically, I theorize that postbellum governments, mirroring narratives on settler colonialism, engage in forced displacement to weaken the opposition and redistribute valuable land and resources from their opposition to their supporters. Using a discrete choice model, I show that the new government’s decision to subjugate, coopt, or evict civilians in these territories is mediated by information about wartime loyalties, economies, population distributions, and geographies.

To provide empirical support for my theory, I employ the universe of all call detail records produced by one of Afghanistan’s largest telecommunications companies to track the approximate location of over 6 million cellphone users, representing about 20% of the country’s population. The data, which span from 2017 to 2022, allow me to generate an original dataset of weekly dyadic flows between Afghanistan’s districts, and determine the drivers of internal displacement dynamics under Taliban rule. 

With Christopher W.  Blair, Igor Kolesnikov and Austin L. Wright.

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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.