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Research

Books

Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming September 2014)  (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

Peer Reviewed Papers

“A Causal Framework to Evaluate Racial Bias in Law Enforcement Systems” AAAI-AIES 2024 (With Jessy Xinyi Han, Andrew Miller, Devavrat Shah, Christopher Winship and Craig Watkins)

“Can Development Programs Counter Insurgencies? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan.” forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics  (With Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov) 

“Social Media Narratives on Conflict: Evidence from Syria,” forthcoming in the Journal of Politics  (With Erin Walk, Kiran Giramella, Elizabeth-Parker Magyar and Ahmet Akbiyik).

“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)

  • Featured in Broadstreet
  • Translated into Chinese for State Studies at Peking University.  

“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

“Who Flees? A Big-Data Approach to the Determinants of Forced Migration,”  Revise and Resubmit at Nature Communications (With Aidan Milliff)

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

“The Social Network Effects of Drone Strikes,” Under Review  (With Paolo Bertolotti, Aidan Milliff and Ali Jadbabaei)

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

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

“The Effects of Body-Worn Cameras on Racial Disparities in Police-Caused Fatalities”, Under Review (With Timur Abbiasov, Jessy (Xinyi) Han, Fabio Duarte, Paolo Santi, and Carlo Ratti)

​”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.

Essays, Reports, Reviews and Pre-Analysis Plans

“Advancing Equality: Harnessing Generative AI to Combat Systemic Racism” (with Saadia Gabriel, Jessy Han, Eric Liu, Isha Puri, Wonyoung So, Munzer Dahleh, Catherine D’Ignazio, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Peko Hosoi and Devavrat Shah)

“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)

Roundtable of Reviews for Paul Staniland’s Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. (Cornell University Press, 2014) in H-Diplo, 11 May 2015.

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

Book Review of T. Barfield’s Princeton University Press book: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Review appeared in The Middle East Journal 64, no. 4 (2010): 650-651.

APSA CP Newsletter, Symposium: Concepts that Hinder Understanding and What to Do About Them: Structuring Political Conflict: Ethnicity, APSA-CP Vol. 20, No.2, p.13, August 2009.

MIT Service

Institute Activities and Committees

2024-now Member of the SERC Seed Grants Selection Committee

2023-2024 Member of the Generative AI Policy Essay Selection Committee

2023-2024 Member of the Selection Committee for Senior Vice Provost for Research

2022-now Member of the Open Data Selection Committee

2022 Member of MIT’s Open Access Task Force

2022 Member of the Social Impact ELO Review Committee

2022 Member of the Antiracism Research Fund Selection Committee

2021-2022 Member of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Afghanistan

2021-2022 Member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Arts, Culture and DEI at MIT

2021-now Head of the International Advisory Committee (IAC)

2020-now Member of the Extended Computing Council

2020 Member of College of Computing Committee on Broadening IDSS in the Social Sciences,

Humanities and the Arts

2019-2020 Member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Guidelines for Outside Engagements

2018-2021 Member of the International Advisory Committee (IAC)

2016-2017 Faculty Member on Graduate Program Committee for Social and Engineering

Systems (SES)

2015-2020 Member of the Graduate Advisor Committee

2015     Second Year Review Committee for Junior Colleague

2015     Comparative Politics Speaker Series Faculty Coordinator

2014-2016 Member of Mission and Scope Committee for MIT’s new entity on complex and socio-

technical systems, information and decision systems, and statistics (IDSS)

2014     Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid (CUAFA)

2012-2014 Member on SHASS Education Advisory Committee

2013     MIT Corporation Spouses Presentation on Women in the Syrian Revolution

2010-2020 Women in International Security, Faculty Chair

2010-now MISTI Global Seed Funds, Member of the Grants Review Committee

Departmental and School Activities and Committees

2020-now         Director, Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, Schwarzman College

2020-now         Academic Head of the Social and Engineering Systems PhD, IDSS

2020-now         Head of the Social and Engineering Systems PhD Admissions Committee, IDSS

2020-now         Head of Diversity Equity and Inclusion Working Group in Political Science

2019-2022        Faculty Affiliate in Global Diversity Lab

2019                 Faculty Advisor on Student Mental Health Survey in Political Science

2019                 Tenure Promotion Case Committee Members for Political Science Faculty

2018-now         Director of Graduate Studies and Placement in Political Science

2018-now         Faculty Organizer of Practice Job Talk Series

2017                 Member of the Graduate Committee in Political Science

2017                 Member of the Undergraduate Committee in Political Science

2015                 Faculty Members of Poverty and Violence Working Group

2013                 Public Policy Minor Advisor

2013                 American Politics Search Committee, Political Science

2012-2014        SHASS Education Advisory Committee

2012-2014        Public Policy Minor Advisor, Political Science

2012-2014        Undergraduate Program Committee, Political Science

2012                 Stanton Chair Search Committee, Political Science

2010                 Political Methodology Search Committee, Political Science

2010                 Burchard Lecture

2009                 Graduate Admissions Committee, Political Science                    

2008                 Political Methodology Search Committee, Political Science

2008-2022        Faculty Affiliate in Security Studies Program

Digital Collections

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).

My Google Scholar profile can be found here