Job Market Candidates 2023

I specialize in using tools from historical political economy to study political violence and conflict processes. My research agenda is based on using original fine-grained data, quantitative and quasi-experimental methods, and nested qualitative analysis to uncover the causes, consequences, and dynamics of the 1948 Palestine War. This includes examining the impact of earlier events on the war, exploring the wartime shifts in strategic violence, and uncovering its long-term legacies in Israeli politics. 

College: Lincoln College

Thesis Title: Signal in Slaughter: Endogenous Conflict Dynamics and Violence Against Civilians in the1948 Palestine War.

Supervisors: Professor Andrea Ruggeri and Professor Stathis Kalyvas FBA

Key Publications: 

2023. "Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior," Journal of Conflict Resolution (w/ Dan Miodowink)

2023. "Bloody Pasts and Current Politics: The Political Legacies of Violent Resettlement," Comparative Political Studies (w/ Dan Miodowink)

2022. "Social Cohesion and Collective Violence: Neighborhood-Level Explanations for Riots in East Jerusalem," Studies on Conflict and Terrorism (w/ Dan Miodowink)

I explore the role of foreign aid as foreign policy for the U.S. Congress. I develop a new framework for understanding U.S. foreign aid and compile novel data on American foreign assistance to demonstrate the power of Congressional committees in foreign aid allocation.

College: University College

Thesis Title: Foreign Aid as Congressional Foreign Policy

Supervisors: Professor Ben Ansell and Professor Desmond King

I explore the causes and consequences of ministerial turnover in presidential systems. My data-gathering is based on optical recognition algorithms and machine learning models. My empirical strategy relies on competing risks models and propensity score matching to estimate the causal effect of resignation calls on reallocations and dismissals in presidential cabinets. I also rely on instrumental variable regressions to measure the corrective effect of dismissing ministers who have received resignation calls on presidential popularity through a blame-shifting dynamic.

College: St Hilda’s College

Thesis Title: Critical Events and Ministerial Turnover in Latin American Presidential Democracies

Supervisor: Professor Petra Schleiter

Key Publications:

2022. "Ministerial stability during presidential approval crises: The moderating effect of ministers’ attributes on dismissals in Brazil and Chile," British Journal of Politics and International Relations

2022. "Cabinet Reshuffles and Parliamentary No‑Confidence Motions," Government and Opposition (w/ Tom Fleming and Petra Schleiter)

2022. "Power Hierarchies and Visibility in the News: Exploring Determinants of Politicians’ Presence and Prominence in the Chilean Press (1991-2019)," The International Journal of Press/Politics (w/ Orchard, X.)

2021. "Evolution and early government responses to COVID-19 in South America," World Development

My research interests lie in understanding how individuals think about economic inequality and its sources. I use experimental methods to uncover individuals’ attitudes towards policies that aim at reducing economic inequality such as including immigrants into the welfare state, increasing taxes on the super-rich or decreasing the salary gap between highly and lowly paid occupations. Apart from looking at public support for certain policies, I also explore how individuals justify market inequality in the first place.

College: Lady Margaret Hall

Thesis title: Fairness beliefs and preferences for redistribution.

Supervisors: Professor F David Rueda and Professor Jane Gingrich.

My research focuses on protests during civil conflict peace processes with a regional focus on Latin America. For my dissertation, I explore demobilized rebels' involvement during protests following Colombia's 2016 peace agreement. In particular, I analyse why some former rebels mobilize but not others, their participation's impact, and how such involvement alters public opinion. I use a mixed methods approach to investigate these research questions, including qualitative analyses based on 14 months of multisite field research in Colombia and a survey experiment.

College: St Hugh’s College

Thesis title: When Rebels Become Protesters: The Involvement of Demobilized Insurgents During Social Uprisings in Colombia

Name of Supervisor: Professor Stathis Kalyvas

My research explores the dynamics of foreign support in conflict. In my dissertation, I ask why some states switch from providing military assistance to warring parties short of combat troops (such as weapons and training) to direct intervention with their own forces over the course of the war. To explain this phenomenon, I develop a theory of foreign support escalation, suggesting that states are incentivised to directly intervene in combat when the recipient of support proves to be ineffective and immediate action is needed on the battlefield. I test the validity of my theory on case studies of civil war in the 20th and 21st century, from the Spanish Civil War to Russia’s intervention in the Donbas in 2014.  

College: Kellogg College 

Thesis Title: “When Proxy Strategy Fails: Why Foreign Sponsors Directly Engage In Combat, from Spain to the Donbas.” 

Supervisor: Professor Andrea Ruggeri, Professor Duncan Snidal 

Key publications: 

2023. “The Future of Proxy Wars” [with Vladimir Rauta]. Chapter in Artur Gruszczak and Sebastian Kaempf (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare. 

2023. “A Proxy War Before the Cold War? European Powers in Spain, 1936-39.” Chapter in Assaf Moghadam, Vladimir Rauta and Michel Wyss (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars.

2021. “Forum: Conflict Delegation in Civil Wars” [with Niklas Karlén et al.]. International Studies Review

2020. “The UK in NATO: London’s Transatlantic Bargain and the Dilemmas of Brexit” [with Linda Slapakova]. Chapter in Michele Testoni (Ed.), NATO and Transatlantic Relations in the 21st century: Foreign and Security Policy Perspectives. 

My research seeks to understand why some crisis-hit countries turn to the IMF for assistance, while others do not. To unravel this puzzle, I argue that we must pay attention to how creditors’ ability to withdraw or withhold capital limits governments’ room for manoeuvre and systematically shapes the choice to enter into Fund programs. My work draws on fieldwork research in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, coupled with analysis of original panel data covering IMF conditional lending from 1984–2019.

College: Nuffield College

Thesis Title: When All Else Fails: Borrowing Governments, Structural Power, and the Puzzle of IMF Programme Participation

Supervisors: Professor Ben Ansell and Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

My research explores the history of Anglo-American fascist international thought during the interwar period through to the mid-twentieth century. I am particularly concerned with ideas of fascist internationalism and recovering intersections between far-right actors and the disciplinary history of International Relations and political science. Beyond my doctoral dissertation, my research also encompasses contemporary forms of far-right extremism and conspiracy theories.

College: St Antony’s College

Thesis Title: Mythologising the Ultra-Nation, Theorising the International: Anglo-American Fascist International Thought and the Disciplinary History of International Relations

Supervisor: Edward Keene

Key Publications:

2023. "Why is There No History of Fascist International Thought?" Millennium

2023. "'A Pro-Fascist English Lady': The International Thought of Muriel Innes Currey," Global Studies Quarterly

 2022. "An Anarchical Society (of Fascist States): Theorising Illiberal Solidarism," Review of International Studies

As a comparativist, I am interested in political parties and institutional development in post-conflict settings; collective political violence; electoral behaviour; and human rights. My doctoral dissertation explains divergent party building trajectories in the aftermath of Latin American civil wars. It combines theory development with rich empirics based on structured and unstructured data, including thorough analysis of in-depth interviews, archival material, and surveys.

College: Campion Hall

Thesis Title: Designed for War, (Un)Successful in Democracy: Party-Building after Civil Conflict in Latin America

Supervisor: Professor Timothy Power