About

I am a political scientist who is primarily interested in why some contests turn violent while others do not. My research centers on rebel governance, wartime political transformations, and the institutional legacies of civil war, with a related focus on the political economy of development assistance in conflict-affected contexts. I pay particular attention to the role of skills, including dialogue skills and the capabilities of leaders and institutions, and to how ideas shape wartime strategies.

My book project, Anatomies of Rebellion, examines how armed groups engage local power structures, from co-optation to transformative projects, and how these choices affect organizational cohesion, susceptibility to infighting, battlefield effectiveness, and longer-term political legacies. The book theorizes how ideology shapes local engagement and identifies the pressures that determine whether principles translate into practice. Empirically, it combines analysis of an original cross-group dataset on rebel political practices with an in-depth study of the Ethiopian civil war from 1974 to 1991.

I hold a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS. I currently work as a Social Development Specialist at the World Bank. In this role, I advise on project design to move beyond “do no harm” and toward evidence-based interventions that build social cohesion and deliver positive peace dividends. I help teams measure contributions to hard-to-observe outcomes, including intergroup relations, trust in government, and collective action. I also help generate new evidence on what works, and under what conditions, to support such outcomes. This work spans multiple regions, with a particular focus on West Africa and farmer-herder relations. Previously, I worked on evaluations of women’s economic empowerment programs, identifying effective pathways to income and agency. Methodologically, I use mixed methods, including fieldwork, experiments, and impact evaluations.