I am the Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I am also Core Faculty at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for International Development, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
My research focuses on the political economy of coercion. I study how states use repression, military mobilization, and other coercive institutions to govern populations, and how these interventions reshape political behavior, human capital, institutions, and economic development over time. A central theme across my work is that, in addition to altering behavior, coercion changes the composition, incentives, capabilities, and social organization of the populations that states seek to control, often generating consequences that persist long after the immediate episode of violence has ended.
My work lies at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations, political economy, and quantitative methodology. Much of my research examines Russia and Eurasia, although my current projects increasingly use comparative historical settings to study broader questions about state violence, military institutions, forced migration, war, and long-run development. Empirically, I combine large-scale archival and administrative data with causal inference, spatial analysis, computational methods, machine learning, and text analysis. A recurring feature of my research is the construction and linkage of new historical and contemporary datasets that allow political behavior to be traced across individuals, places, institutions, and time.
My book project, Drafting Dissent, examines the relationship between state repression, military recruitment, and political loyalty under autocracy. The project asks why authoritarian governments recruit politically marginalized populations into institutions that provide weapons, organizational experience, mobility, and new social ties, and how military service subsequently changes the political behavior of those populations. Focusing on Imperial Russia, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing civil war, I link millions of historical military, administrative, census, and repression records to trace individuals and communities from prewar marginalization through military service and subsequent revolutionary politics. The book develops a broader argument about a fundamental dilemma of authoritarian governance: coercive institutions can strengthen states in the short run while simultaneously transforming the political capacities of the people they are designed to control.
A growing part of my research extends this agenda to the longer-run social and economic consequences of coercion. Current projects examine how forced migration reallocates human capital and shapes local development, how wartime mobilization transforms labor markets and gender roles, how military institutions generate persistent political and institutional legacies, and how historical insecurity contributes to the formation of norms surrounding violence and protection. Other work examines civilian adaptation, migration, information, and political behavior during contemporary conflict. Across these projects, I am interested in a common question: how do episodes of political violence restructure societies, both during the period of coercion and across subsequent generations?
I am passionate about synthesizing data science, history, and developmental economics with political science to better understand the drivers and outcomes of violence. My research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of Peace Research. My published and working papers can be found on my research page and google scholar. You can access my CV here.
My work has received the Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, Juan Linz Best Dissertation Award of the American Political Science Association's Democracy and Autocracy section, Pi Sigma Alpha Overall Conference Best Paper Award, Kellogg/Notre Dame Best Paper Award in Comparative Politics, Robert H. Durr Best Paper Award in Quantitative Methods, Best Paper in International Relations, Best Paper in Political Behavior awards from the Midwest Political Science Association, Dina Zinnes and Patricia Weitsman Best Paper awards from the International Studies Association, David Brian Robertson Best Paper Award from the History and Politics section of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Paper Award of the American Political Science Association's Democracy and Autocracy section.
My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, William Milton Fund, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, Institute for Social Research, Center for the Education of Women, and several other centers at the University of Michigan. I was a 2016-2017 Marshall Weinberg Population, Development, and Climate Change Fellow at the Population Studies Center, 2015-2016 Emerging Democracy Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, a 2016 Diversity and Diplomacy Fellow at the Humanity in Action, and a 2010 Black Sea Young Reformers Fellow of the German Marshall Fund and Robert Bosch Foundation.
Before joining Harvard, I was an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Political Science Department and Data Science Institute and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania DevLab@Penn.
I received my Ph.D. from the Departments of Political Science and Scientific Computing (Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering) and a dual M.S. in Statistics from the University of Michigan, where I was a Rackham Pre-doctoral Fellow and a graduate student associate with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. I hold an MPA (2014) degree from Harvard University and an MA (2009) in International Relations from Seton Hall University, John Whitehead School of Diplomacy. I received my BA (2007) in International Relations and European Studies from the Azerbaijan University of Foreign Languages.