Research

Books

Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust, under contract with Cambridge University Press (with Graeme Blair and Jeremy Weinstein eds).

Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Reviewed in: The Boston Globe, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Peace Research, The Middle East Journal, Survival, H-Diplo,  International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nationalities Papers and featured in Georgetown Journal of International Affairs and MIT News

 Referenced in blogs in: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy

Papers

"Empowering women facing gender-based violence amid COVID-19 through media campaigns", Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01665-y (With Horacio Larreguy, Manuel Quintero and Elizabeth Parker-Magyar).

"Displacement and Return in the Internet Era: How Social Media Captures Migration Decisions in Northern Syria", World Development , Volume 168, 2023 (with Erin Walk and Kiran Garimella).

"Mitigating the Impact of Biased Artificial Intelligence in Emergency Decision-Making," Communications Medicine, 2022. (With Hammaad Adam, Emily Alsentzer, Aparna Balagopalan and Marzyeh Ghassemi).

  • Accepted for presentation at Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning (TSRML) and Deploy and Monitor ML at NeurIPS 2022.
  • Featured on MIT News

"Evidence on the nature of sectarian animosity from a geographically representative survey of Iraqi and Iranian Shia pilgrims." Nature Human Behavior, 2022 Sep;6(9):1226-1233. (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox).

“Community Policing Does not Build Trust in Police or Reduce Crime in the Global South”, Science 374, 1098 (2021). (With Graeme Blair, Jeremy Weinstein, Eric Arias, Emile Bardan, Robert A. Blair, Ali Cheema, Ahsan Farooqui, Thiemo Fetzer, Guy Grossman, Dotan Haim, Zulfiqar Hameed, Rebecca Hanson, Ali Hasanain, Dorothy Kronick, Benjamin Morse, Robert Muggah, Fatiq Nadeem, Lily Tsai, Matthew Nanes, Tara Slough, Nico Ravanilla, Jacob N. Shapiro, Barbara Silva, Pedro L. Souza, Anna Wilke). 

“Scalable Equilibrium Computation in Multi-agent Influence Games on Networks,” in Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), (with Michael Curry, Constantinos Daskalakis, Erik Demaine, John P. Dickerson, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Adam Hesterberg, Marina Knittel, and Aidan Milliff).

“COVID-19 and Fieldwork: Challenges and Solutions,” Peter Krause and Ora Szekely (eds.), in PS: Political Science and Politics 54(2), 264-269. doi:10.1017/S1049096520001754.

“The Effect of Drone Strikes on Civilian Communication: Evidence from Yemen,” Political Science Research and Methods, 1-9 doi:10.1017/psrm.2021.22  (With Michael Freedman, Spyros Zoumpoulis, Leon Yao and Ali Jadbabaei)

"Tests for Network Cascades via Branching Processes,"  in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 2693-2701, 1 Oct.-Dec. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TNSE.2020.2981327. (With Paolo Bertolotti and Ali Jadbabaei)

"State Capacity Redux: Integrating Classical and Experimental Contributions to an Enduring Debate,"Annual Review of Political Science (ARPS), Vol. 21, 2018. (With Elissa Berwick)

“Direct Democracy and Resource Allocation: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan,” Journal of Development Economics (JDE), 124, 199-213. (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov)

“Electoral Rules and Political Selection: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan,” The Review of Economic Studies (ReStud), 83 (3), 932-968. (With Andrew Beath, Georgy Egorov and Ruben Enikolopov)

“Empowering Women through Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review. 107 (3): 540-557. (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov)

“Context Modularity of Human Altruism,” Science. 334 (6061): 1392-1394. (With Marc Alexander)

“Following the Money: Muslim versus Muslim in Bosnia’s Civil War,” Comparative  Politics. 40 (4): 461-480. Reprinted in Political Violence, Erica Chenoweth, eds., SAGE Library of International Relations.

Working Papers

“Social Media Narratives on Conflict in northern Syria,” Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Politics  (with Erin Walk, Kiran Giramella, Elizabeth-Parker Magyar and Ahmet Akbiyik).

“Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan,”  Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics  (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov) Appendix

“Imams and Businessmen: Service Provision in Turkey,”  Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Conflict Resolution (With Tugba Bozcaga)

“The Police or the Public? Racial Bias in 911 Calls and Policing”, Under Review, (with Devavrat Shah, Jessy Han, Andrew Miller, Craig Watkins and Chris Winship).

"The Social Network Effects of Drone Strikes," Under Review  (With Paolo Bertolotti and Ali Jadbabaei)

“Do Elected Councils Improve Governance? Experimental Evidence on Local Institutions in Afghanistan,” Under Review (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov)

"Who Flees? A Big-Data Approach to the Determinants of Forced Migration,"  Under Review (with Aidan Miliff)

​"Networks of Sectarianism: Experimental Evidence on Access to Services in Baghdad." (With Dean Knox and Jaffar Al-Rikabi)

“Training Py Torch-Big Graph Embeddings on a Large Real World CDR Graph.” (With Michael Curry, Aidan Millif, Adam Hesterberg, Constantinos Daskalakis, Erik Demaine, John Dickerson and Mohammadtaghi Hajiaghayi)

Book Chapters

"Piety and Religious Communalism among Shiites in Iraq and Iran," The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies, eds. Melani Cammett and Pauline Jones, Oxford University Press, 2020 (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox)

"Navigating Data Collection in War Zones,"  Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science, eds. Peter Krause and Ora Szekely, Columbia University Press, 2020.

  • Book selected as Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title for 2021

"Assessing Syrian Refugee Integration Using Call Detail Records from Turkey," in Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios, eds. Salah, Pentland, Lepri, Letouze, Vinck, de Montjoye and Dong, Springer, 2019. (With Tugba Bozcaga, Constantinos  Daskalakis, Elizabeth Harwood,  Christos  Papadimitriou)

"Decentralization in Post-Conflict Settings: Assessing Community-Driven Development in the Wake of Violence," in Decentralized Governance and Accountability: Academic Research and the Future of Donor Programming, eds. Jonathan Rodden and Erik Wibbels, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Reports, Reviews and Pre-Analysis Plans

"Violence Against Women amid COVID-19: The Effects of Social and Traditional Media Campaigns to Empower Women Pre-Analysis Plan" (with Horacio Larreguy, Norhan Muhab, Elizabeth Parker-Magyar). Registered at AEA RCT Registry.

Review of The Historical Roots of Political Violence: Revolutionary Terrorism in Affluent Countries. By Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 296p. $39.99 cloth in Perspectives on Politics, 18 (2):655-656.

"Meta-Analysis Pre-Analysis Plan on Community Policing," 2018. (With Graeme Blair and Jeremy Weinstein)

"To Karbala: Surveying Religious Shi’a from Iran and Iraq," (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox)

"Pre-Analysis Plan for an Impact Evaluation of USAID's "Communities Thrive" Local Governance Program in the West Bank," 2018.(With Erin York and Ruben Enikolopov)

"Impact Evaluation Design for USAID’s “Communities Thrive” Local Governance Program in the West Bank," 2017. (With Erin York and Ruben Enikolopov)

"Baseline Report for USAID’s “Communities Thrive” Local Governance Program in the West Bank," 2017. (With Erin York and Ruben Enikolopov)

The  final report, as well as our midline, baseline and monitoring reports, along with our preanalysis plans and instruments and data related to the randomized impact evaluation of Afghanistan's National Solidarity Program can be found here: www.nsp-ie.com

"The National Solidarity Programme: Assessing the Effects of Community-Driven Development in Afghanistan", International Peacekeeping. 22 (4): 302-320. Special Issue: Development Assistance for Peacebuilding. (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov)

"Civil Service Reform in Post-Conflict Societies," Research Note: World Bank i2i Fragile and Conflict State Impact Evaluation Research Program, February 2015. (With Jurgen Blum and Daniel Rogger)

Digital Collections

Ways of Seeing: Generating Digital Twins to Document Endangered Heritage Sites in Afghanistan, 2022-2023 MIT Mellon Faculty Grant 

Photos from Tehran murals I collected in 2006 that are now archived at Harvard University Libraries Digital Collections.

Essays and Opinion

"Community Policing Is Not One Size Fits All," Foreign Policy, 29 November 2021 (With Graeme Blair and Jeremy Weinstein).

"Training the COVID-19 Cohort: Adapting and Preserving Social Science Research," SSRC Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, 30 July 2020 (With Chappell Lawson).

"Tehran Paints Over its AntiAmerican Murals," Foreign Policy, 11 November 2019.

"Even Conservative Iranians Want Closer Ties to the United States," Foreign Policy, 23 May 2019 (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox).

"The Geography of Gulenism in Turkey," Foreign Policy, 18 March 2019 (With Tugba Bozcaga).

"Turkish Referendum Rallies in Europe Made Headlines. Did they Affect Election Results?" Monkey Cage/The Washington Post, 6 May 2017 (With Tugba Bozcaga).

"Shiites are Participating in the World's Largest Pilgrimage Today. Here is how they View the World," Monkey Cage/The Washington Post, 21 November 2016 (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox).

"Mapping Shiite Opinion: Insights from the Arba'een Pilgrimage," Foreign Affairs, 24 October 2016 (With Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox).

"Yemen Calling: Seven Things Cell Data Reveal About Life in the Republic," Foreign Affairs, 6 July 2015 (With Leon Yao, Stephen Wittels and Jure Leskovec).

Roundtable of Reviews for Paul Staniland's Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, in H-Diplo 7(16), 11 May 2015.

"Too Much of a Good Thing," Foreign Policy, 18 December 2013 (With Ruben Enikolopov).

“What Can Civil War Scholars Tell US about the Syrian Conflict,” appeared in The Political Science of Syria’s War, POMEPS Briefings in collaboration with Foreign Policy, 18 December 2013.

Roundtable of Reviews of Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) in H-Diplo 6 (2), 11 October 2013.

"Why I fight for a Free Syria: A graphic story of one man's struggle," Al Jazeera America, 5 September 2013 (With Thalia Chantziara).

“How Syrian Women are fueling the Resistance and Why Washington Should Support them,” Foreign Affairs, 6 March 2013.

"Doing the Least Harm: How to Prevent a Post-Withdrawal Resumption of Violence in Afghanistan and Iraq," Ethnopolitics 11 1 (2012): 98-100.

“Letter from Kabul: Fear and Abandonment in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, 26 June 2011.

“Defining Success in Afghanistan: What can the United States Accept,” Foreign Affairs, 89 (4): 48-60, July/August 2010 (With Stephen Biddle and J. Alexander Thier).

“Viewpoint: Measuring Success in Afghanistan,” The BBC, 22 February 2010 (With Thalia Chantziara).

“Co-opt the Commanders,” The New York Times, 1 September 2009 (With Michael Semple).

“Sartorial Stumping,” The New York Times Op-Ed Page, 18 August 2009 (With Thalia Chantziara).

“Flipping the Taliban How to Win in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, 88 (4):34-45, July/August 2009 (With Michael Semple).

“A Quiet Battle for Rights in Iran,” The Washington Post, 27 August 2007.

“Voices of Iranian Reform, Silenced,” The Washington Post, 9 July 2006.

“Hamas at the Helm,” The New York Times Op-Ed Page, 27 January 2006 (With Sreemati Mitter).

“Strange Bedfellows in Afghanistan,” The Boston Globe, 18 September 2005.

“Uzbekistan’s Tiananmen,” The Boston Globe, 21 May 2005.

 

My Google Scholar profile can be found here

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