Manasi Bose

I am a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics at Princeton University. I expect to receive my PhD in the summer of 2026, and am on the 2025-2026 job market. 

My research interests lie in understanding the dynamics of international intervention and the consequences of third-party intervention for conflict resolution in civil war, with a regional focus on the Middle East. This work sits at the intersection of international security studies and comparative politics, and fits into my broader research agenda that examines the sources and nature of rebel legitimacy; and the responses engendered by rebel governance.

In my dissertation, I examine the conditions under which rebels transition from armed rebellion to non-violent political strategies and address the question of why groups with no expectation of legitimacy or legal recognition engage in costly political institutionalization. I theorize that the establishment of constituent-focused political institutions by rebel groups insulates them from the worst forms of negative intervention and increases the likelihood that they will receive international support. I test this theory using an in-depth case study of US policy towards the Salafi-jihadist Syrian rebel group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that draws on elite interviews and a corpus of public-facing US government documents pertaining to the Syrian civil war. I also establish the broader applicability of this theory using cross-national data on rebel political institutions and US support to rebel groups.

Prior to my PhD, I completed a Master's in Public Policy with honors at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and an MSc. in Social and Public Communication with distinction from the London School of Economics.