My research examines the connection between governance and instability. My work investigates this relationship across three areas: peacekeeping and civilian protection, democratic backsliding and military coups, and conflict and political violence.
A. Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection
Drones, Peacekeeping, and Civilian Protection in Armed Conflict
This project focuses on the deployment of drones for civilian protection in peacekeeping. While emerging technologies like drones have attracted much interest in many fields over the last two decades because of their effectiveness in accomplishing difficult tasks with limited risk, much of the literature on the subject of drones' effectiveness has primarily been studied in the context of on War Terror, focusing on insurgent behavior. We know little about drones’ effectiveness in non-combat areas like peacekeeping. Because of this limitation, policymakers and scholars stand at risk of basing the deployment of drones in peacekeeping on assumptions made of their effectiveness in combat. Focusing on the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo, I fill this gap by answering two crucial questions: 1) Under what conditions are drones effective for civilian protection in peacekeeping? 2) What shapes civilian support for their use in peacekeeping contexts?
I employ a qualitative methodology comprising expert interviews and document reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of drones for civilian protection in peacekeeping. I conducted expert interviews with UN officials at the UN headquarters and mission levels, mission intelligence officers, peacekeepers, and humanitarian workers. Insights from these data sources suggest that the effectiveness of drones for civilian protection in peacekeeping depends on the quality of accompanying peacekeeping operational capacity to enable peacekeepers to intervene timely to avert attacks on civilian populations. However, mission-level challenges of UN peacekeeping, including inadequate infrastructure on the ground to analyze drone surveillance data and lack of ground operational capacity, cause the deployment of drones to be poorly integrated into other mechanisms of peacekeeping that enable peacekeepers to intervene on the ground to prevent armed attacks against civilian populations.
Regarding civilian support for the deployment of drones in peacekeeping, I argue that the deployment of drones in peacekeeping has two implications for civilian populations in conflict contexts. On the one hand, drones can provide security for civilians, and on the other hand, they are a potential source of violation of privacy norms. I argue that civilian beliefs about these implications are shaped by the identity of actors deploying drones and perceptions about whether surveillance data from drones is accessible to outgroup members. I substantiate these arguments using an original survey experiment in the Eastern DR Congo, where United Nations peacekeepers have deployed drones.
Digital technologies and civilian self-protection
This research agenda focuses on how civilians in armed conflicts utilize digital technologies to enhance their safety. Rather than centering state or humanitarian systems, my work emphasizes bottom-up practices: how communities appropriate mobile networks, social media, messaging apps, and GIS tools to anticipate threats, verify information, coordinate movement, and protect the most vulnerable. In this research, I pose simple yet urgent questions: when and how do technology platforms actually enhance early warning and situational awareness? What social and technical conditions make these tools effective or dangerous? And how can these lessons be applied to policy and platform design without exposing people to new risks?
This research conceptualizes a platform ecology of protection, illustrating how protective mechanisms like alerting, verification, routing, sheltering, and counter-messaging interact with enablers and constraints such as coverage, cost, language, literacy, trust networks, moderation rules, shutdowns, and gendered access. This framework clarifies why a tool can be lifesaving in one community and damaging in another.
Empirically, this study is based on two comparative cases - South Sudan and Burkina Faso. In South Sudan, the project examines how platform-mediated alerts and community mapping shape responses to inter-communal violence, tracking how groups verify claims, mark safe routes, dampen rumor, and mobilize help under time constraints. In Burkina Faso, the project focuses on how communities facing extremist threats adapt platforms to sustain dispersed early-warning networks, communicate around local ceasefires, and support civilian-led protection initiatives. The comparative analysis of these allows variation in conflict actors, network reliability, information control, and humanitarian presence, allowing me to identify generalizable mechanisms rather than platform- or country-specific anecdotes.
Methodologically, the project relies on structured interviews with community group leaders as well as humanitarian workers.
This research contributes to the literature by clarifying how civilians build protective capacity in conflict settings through digital technologies. By emphasizing how civilian creativity addresses threats, this work explains how and when technology can effectively improve safety, and how policy and platform choices can support grassroots protective efforts instead of unintentionally weakening them.
Effectiveness of Peacekeeping as Counterinsurgency
International peace operations are increasingly deployed into environments dominated by insurgency and terrorism. Rather than simply monitoring ceasefires or supporting negotiations, peacekeepers in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, have been asked to fight insurgents, stabilize territory, and extend fragile state authority. In practice, they are often performing the tasks of counterinsurgency while still bound by the principles and political constraints of peacekeeping. This project examines what explains the successes and failures of peacekeeping in these contexts and how international legitimacy, impartiality, and human rights obligations alter the logic of counterinsurgency.
By combining comparative case studies, district-level data analysis, and process tracing, the project evaluates when and how peacekeepers can effectively counter insurgent groups without undermining their credibility. It interrogates the role of mandate design, multinational troop contributions, enablers such as air mobility and intelligence, host-state partnerships, and external patrons. The findings provide both theoretical insights into the evolving nature of peacekeeping and practical guidance for policymakers on designing future missions that can meet the challenge of insurgency without abandoning core peacekeeping principles.
B. Conflict and Political Violence
What shapes civilian preferences towards intergroup violence? ( with Zlatin Mitkov)
My research agenda explores how civilians perceive, justify, and respond to violence in conflict settings. Drawing on political psychology, it investigates how moral emotions like shame, guilt, and fear interact with social identity and perceived roles in conflict (such as victim or perpetrator) to influence support for retribution, reconciliation, or third-party intervention. This research includes three projects testing this framework in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The first project explains why communities in reciprocal violence contexts sometimes support ingroup members who join armed groups to engage in violence against outgroups, despite the risk of retaliation against the ingroup. The second project examines how victim and perpetrator identities shape preferences for reconciliation versus retribution, and how dignity-preserving reintegration can alter attitudes. The third project investigates how public approval of peacekeepers depends on who commits harm and who suffers it. Collectively, these studies focus on civilians’ moral perspectives in conflict politics and translate these mechanisms into practical guidance for violence prevention, transitional justice, and protection mandates.
Choice After War: Preferences, Pathways, and Peace Legacies in Nepal (with Zlatin Mitkov, Santosh Saptoka, and Konstantin Ash)
This research examines how ex‑combatants’ preferences at the end of Nepal’s war and the options available to them—military integration, cash retirement, vocational rehabilitation, or disqualification—shape the long-term legacies of peace. It advances a key argument: when peace settlements provide meaningful choices to combatants, individuals choose post‑war pathways based on their risk tolerance, identities, and networks. These pathways expose them to different forms of socialization and everyday contact, which then influence their beliefs and behaviors. In Nepal, verified former Maoist fighters could either join the national army or accept a lump-sum retirement; smaller rehabilitation and disqualification options added further variation. This structure of demobilization among former Maoist fighters creates a natural experiment, which we leverage to explain how individual decisions contribute to the local and national legacies of peace by addressing various research questions.
The first project examines whether integration into the Nepali Army deradicalizes ex‑combatants. It explores whether those who integrate, compared to similar peers who chose cash compensation, show higher trust in state institutions, stronger civic national identity, and greater democratic commitment. Methodologically, the study combines a structured survey of multiple veteran groups with semi‑structured interviews that explore mechanisms like training‑based socialization, command climate, and routine contact with former adversaries. The survey measures attitudes toward national symbols such as parliament, courts, the election commission, and the army, as well as acceptance of political violence and opinions on the peace process and transitional justice. The interviews investigate how rank, unit culture, and leadership cues reshaped identities from partisan to national. The anticipated outcome is evidence that integration, by offering stable income, credible sanctions, and professional norms, shifts beliefs toward institutional trust and reduces the desire for coercive entrepreneurship. If the results show only modest attitudinal changes without behavioral effects, it will highlight the limits of organizational socialization.
The second project examines what influences former combatants’ preference formation during the demobilization and integration process. We ask why equally eligible fighters diverged, with some former Maoists joining the army, while others preferred cash or rehabilitation. To answer this, we focus on how commander leverage, family needs, expected stigma, and local labor market potential shape combatants’ decisions. Methodologically, we use paired interviews with actors who had the same eligibility but chose different paths, incorporating a retrospective discrete-choice module that captures counterfactual preferences.
The third question addresses coexistence and intergroup forgiveness. It asks which forms of everyday contact most reliably promote forgiveness toward wartime adversaries and reduce rumor-driven fear. We employ a design that combines a representative community survey in areas with varying densities of integrators and cash retirees, along with focused ethnography in paired sites. Our survey includes forgiveness scales, measures of contact frequency and quality, and documents specific episodes of cooperation and dispute resolution. This research makes the contribution of mapping which settings consistently foster intergroup attitude change and where contact may backfire.
The fourth project explores transitional justice, apologies, and the legitimacy of peace. It investigates how the choices of former combatants and their conflict-related identities influence support for truth-seeking, reparations, amnesties, and the credibility of apologies from former Maoists, army officers, or civilian leaders. The study employs an experimental design using vignettes that vary the apologizer's identity, acknowledgment versus responsibility, and the presence of material remedies. It also looks at different effects among integrators, cash retirees, and disqualified individuals. Through this approach, we gather detailed insights into how pathways and identities influence acceptance of justice processes.
C. Democratic Backsliding, Regional Norms, and the Politics of Coups in Africa
Across Africa, democratic institutions are struggling under illiberal incumbency, waning public confidence, and a resurgence of military coups. This research agenda centers on a central question: under what circumstances do African publics support efforts to defend democracy, and when do they instead support military intervention as a remedy for democratic failure? This research links three levels of politics: regional, intergovernmental democracy promotion and good governance norm enforcement, national democratic performance, and citizen beliefs. It focuses on three mechanisms that influence public opinion regarding support for democracy or military intervention in politics: the economic evaluation of the usefulness of regional intergovernmental bodies promoting democracy, propaganda about military competence, and collective memory of past military rule. The research aims to account for cross-national and within-country variation in support for coups and to identify policy levers that shore up democratic legitimacy without inadvertently valorizing unconstitutional change.
This research agenda comprises four interconnected studies that progress from legitimacy foundations to attitudinal patterns, then to the moderating role of historical memory, and finally to causal tests of the mechanisms and their corrections. First, it establishes how regional intergovernmental bodies earn public buy-in for their democracy promotion and good governance norms; second, it maps where democratic disillusionment translates into support for coups; third, it explains why that translation is dampened or amplified across countries; and fourth, it experimentally tests whether credible reminders and fact-checking of military records of past military regimes can counter the pull of pro-coup narratives.
Local Perceptions, Regional Action: On Sources of Public Legitimacy for African Regional Organizations’ Democracy Promotion Mechanisms
The first study investigates the sources of public legitimacy for democracy-promotion by African regional organizations. Using survey evidence from 34 countries, my collaborators and I show that citizens’ support for regional enforcement of democratic norms rises with two judgments: that the particular organization advancing those norms is useful to their own country, and that democracy is preferable to alternatives. Because regional organizations often operate at elite distance from voters, citizens most readily evaluate “usefulness” through tangible economic performance. The implication is straightforward: to bolster legitimacy for democracy promotion, regional bodies must pair normative enforcement with visible economic delivery and clear communication about that delivery. This study aims to clarify what makes regional action towards democracy promotion publicly tenable in the first place.
Democratic Coup d'états? Explaining Support for Military Intervention in Politics
The second study asks whether populations that see their democracies as captured by illiberal elected elites become more willing to support military intervention as a corrective measure to redeem their democracy. Drawing on Afrobarometer data across 36 countries, the study examines whether perceptions of constitutional manipulation, rights curtailment, and corruption predict pro-coup attitudes. Importantly, the study examines why similar frustrations with elected leaders may or may not lead to uniform enthusiasm for military rule.
Remembering to Resist: Democratic Disillusionment and the Return of Coups in Africa
The third study poses a simple yet neglected question: when citizens are disillusioned with democracy, do their memories of past military rule—its human rights abuses, corruption, and economic failures—temper the appeal of a coup today? This research argues that the legacy of military governance matters not only as history but as a moderator of public’s response to coups today. Where people remember soldiers to have performed poorly —on human rights, the economy, and corruption—disillusionment with civilians is less likely to translate into support for military intervention. Where that legacy is absent, ambiguous, or forgotten, the same frustrations can more easily give rise to pro-coup sentiment.
To study this, we rely on a continent-wide, country-year dataset for all 54 African states since independence, which takes into account realized and attempted coups, years spent under military regimes, and, crucially, a qualitative assessment of how military governments actually performed while in power. This approach enables us to develop a Military Governance Index that captures three key indicators of governance under military regimes, including protection of human rights and civil liberties, economic management, and the prevalence of public sector and political corruption.
Empirically, the agenda proceeds on two tracks that speak to both inference and mechanism. First, we estimate multi-country, multi-level models that link citizens’ democratic disillusionment to their willingness to support a coup, while allowing the relationship to vary across each country’s legacy of military governance. This approach treats memory as a macro-level moderator of micro-level attitudes, allowing us to separate the effect of being disappointed with elected leaders from the effect of knowing, or forgetting, what military rulers delivered in practice.
The study aims to make significant contributions to the literature. Conceptually, it recasts support for military coups as a function not only of current governance but also of remembered governance under military rule. This perspective explains why similar levels of democratic frustration can produce very different attitudes across countries. The research further offers evidence for policy regarding when and where public reminders of a military rule’s real record can inoculate against the romanticization of “benevolent” coups, how to target such messages, and how regional organizations, election bodies, and civic groups can communicate failures of democracy without legitimizing unconstitutional removal of governments.
Public Support for Military Coups in States with Legacies of Failed Military Regimes
This study aims to explain why citizens in democracies with long, historically poor records of military rule sometimes support new coups. If earlier juntas governed badly—on human rights, economic management, and corruption—why doesn’t that record inoculate publics against renewed military intervention? This research tests two mechanisms that may sustain pro-coup sentiment despite negative legacies: targeted propaganda that inflates perceptions of military competence today, and historical amnesia that dulls recall of yesterday’s failures.
We examine these dynamics in Ghana and Nigeria, two West African democracies with extensive legacies of military governance and located in a region where coups have recently resurged and, in some cases, attracted visible public support. We fielded a nationally representative survey experiment with approximately 2,500 respondents across the two countries. We employ a factorial design to estimate the independent and joint effects of propaganda and memory on support for military coups, as well as to test corrective interventions. The factorial design also enables tests of interactions—for example, whether credible reminders neutralize the influence of pro-military propaganda and whether propaganda is most persuasive among respondents with weak baseline recall of military performance. The primary outcomes are indices that capture approval of military takeovers and willingness to endorse military involvement in politics in the event of specified failures by civilian authorities.
The study clarifies when democratic disillusionment translates into support for a military coup and adjudicates whether propaganda or amnesia does the heavier lifting.