Homophily—our tendency to form ties with people like ourselves—is a near-universal feature of human social networks. Scholars often assume that ties between members of different racial, ethnic, or religious groups will not only be rarer but also weaker on average than ties withi…
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What explains change in militant organizations' structures and behaviors? How do rebel groups cope with crises such as acute repression, mass displacement, or fragmentation? More broadly, how can we conceptualize militant organizations' adaptive processes? Drawing on nineteen mo…
In this dissertation I examine why some development projects have succeeded while others failed to complete during the post-2001 Afghan insurgency. Through disaggregated statistical analysis, I find that interactions of location, time, ethnic heterogeneity (Cederman et al. 2009)…
What determines economic growth after civil wars? States emerging from civil war face a host of political, social, and economic challenges to recovery. But, extant research demonstrates that states with greater economic growth after civil war are more likely to sustain the peace…
Throughout history, warring parties have contravened norms or laws that prescribe the protection of noncombatant civilians, and wars have often wreaked tremendous havoc on civilian populations. In this dissertation, I investigate conditions under which state leaders embroiled in…
The United States today defines its greatest security threats as insurgents and terrorists. It is trying to defeat them with a method of counterinsurgency (COIN) known as the population-centric approach. Is the conventional wisdom correct in claiming that the population-centric …
What are the factors that motivate youth to take up arms and mobilize in organized violence? That is the central question of this project, applied to two case contexts, Sri Lanka and Nicaragua. The project's integrative system dynamics methodology synthesizes competing causal ex…
Why are authoritarian breakdowns often fraught with communal violence? The literatures on authoritarian breakdowns, democratization, and ethnic conflict include theories that can explain either the temporal or spatial variation of communal violence but not both. A more compellin…
Why do some governments and rebel groups deliberately attack civilians during civil war? Why do other groups refrain from targeting civilians, largely complying with the norms of noncombatant immunity codified in international humanitarian law? This dissertation seeks to explain…
Why do the institutional outcomes of armed separatist conflicts vary? Separatist conflicts have diverse institutional effects. Though many separatists hope to create sovereign states, few achieve their aims. More often, their conflicts lead to forms of intra-state autonomy, inde…
This dissertation consists of four essays. The topics broadly speaking cover industrial organization (essay one), corporate finance/law and economics (essay two) and political economy (essays three and four). The first essay is "Consolidation, Volume and Outcomes in Leukemia Tre…
Within the generally under-researched topic of civil war, research on the question of the causes of civil war is in a state of confusion. This is due primarily to the persistence of a false dichotomy between material and social-psychological theories, as well as to a tendency to…
This dissertation is about state foreign responses to violations of international humanitarian law in African civil wars. Its central concern is with the extent to which international humanitarian law obligations shape state foreign policy decisions, as opposed to calculations o…
Between 1956 and 1999 one-third of the civil wars in the world occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. The prevailing explanation given to account for this fact is the economic weakness of African states. While low income is a robust determinant of civil war onset in global models, it i…
Exclusion and violence persist in post-conflict states, despite external assistance to the demilitarization of politics, which the literature emphasizes as the primary goal of aid. Through a field-based study of Tajikistan and a survey of an additional three cases (Cambodia, Gua…
This dissertation uses approaches and concepts from conflict resolution literature to answer two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it seeks to explain why some peace agreements are signed while others do not get signed, and second, why some agreemen…
Why did Tajikistan's state collapse into a five year civil war while state power in Uzbekistan became mired in prebendal politics? Theories drawn from the comparative study of the state, which have tended to concentrate sources of varying state development in the hands of rulers…
Contemporary conflicts often produce vast territories outside the control of the recognized political sovereign. Instead of sinking into anarchy, rebel organizations may establish forms of political and social order within these territories. While many rebel groups remain predat…
This dissertation focuses on a history of the Nilotic Dinka of the Southern Sudan and integrates their experience into the wider literature of ancient, medieval and modern Sudanese historiography. Working from approximately three hundred oral interviews, published sources and th…