Can prolonged contact improve local residents' relations with internally displaced persons (IDPs) in fragile and violent settings? Despite record numbers of IDPs globally, there are few experimental tests of the causal effects of intergroup contact in conflict settings, and none with migrant...

Information about insurgent groups is a central resource in civil wars: counterinsurgents seek it, insurgents safeguard it, and civilians often trade it. Yet despite its central role in civil war dynamics, the act of informing is still poorly understood, due mostly to the classified nature of...

How do insurgents choose their tactics in civil wars? While most theories of civil war violence marginalize the role of ideology, we argue that the location, type, and lethality of insurgent violence are all shaped by the underlying spatial distribution of civilians' relative support for...

Large arrivals Aof refugees raise concerns about potential tensions with host communities, particularly if refugees are viewed as an out-group competing for limited material resources and crowding out public services. To address this concern, calls have increased to allocate humanitarian aid in...

A large literature suggests that the presence of refugees is associated with greater risk of conflict. We argue that the potentially positive effects of hosting refugees on local conditions have been over-looked. Using global data from 1990 to 2018 on locations of refugee communities and civil...

Efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance, particularly in low socio-economic contexts, are frequently ineffective because citizens believe their voices and actions will not be respected by relevant authorities. We conduct two studies with over 2,200 citizens in rural Tanzania...

During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in...

Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This...