About

I study why some political contests turn or remain violent while others do not. My work focuses on rebel governance, wartime political transformations, and the institutional legacies of civil war. Across projects, I pay close attention to how leaders and institutions build (or fail to build) capabilities: the skills that make bargaining, coalition-building, and local rule possible. I also examine how ideas and ideology shape wartime strategies.

Research topics: rebel governance, wartime institutions, ideology and strategy, political violence, aid legitimacy in conflict-affected contexts

Methods: mixed methods, including original data compilation, in-depth qualitative research, survey experiments, and impact evaluations

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

Earlier in my career, I worked on barriers to women’s economic opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa, including evaluations of programs aimed at increasing women’s income and agency.

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, where I focus on conflict-sensitive project design and measurement of hard-to-observe outcomes in fragile contexts.