I am a political scientist studying political violence and armed groups — how they recruit, hold together, fragment, and how they adapt to new tools of war.
My work, grounded in international relations, draws on original data, archival materials, and field research to ask questions like: Why do some violent organizations endure while others fragment and fall apart? How do armed groups innovate, and why are some more likely to innovate than others? And why do terrorists and insurgents recruit certain kinds of people? I am particularly interested in the human texture of armed groups — who joins, who stays, and how the mixture of people shapes the group as a whole.
I am Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, where I have been on the faculty since 2017. I currently hold a Democracy Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and was previously a Faculty Research Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, a Nonresident Fellow at the Marine Corps University's Krulak Center, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Denver's Sié Center.
I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, and my BA, with high honors, from Wesleyan University in 2010.
My first book, Divided Not Conquered: How Rebels Fracture and Splinters Behave (Oxford University Press, 2022), was a finalist for the Conflict Research Society Book of the Year. My current project, the Armed Rebellion Coding (ARC) dataset, documents how armed groups recruit across nine dimensions for 319 organizations between 1941 and 2012.