Research

No War, Yet No Peace: How States and Armed Groups Coexist (Book Project)

In many parts of the world, states do not exercise full authority over their territory or maintain a monopoly on violence. Instead, armed groups often persist alongside central governments, wielding varying degrees of domestic authority. My book project investigates when and how states and rebel groups coexist in this gray zone between civil war and formal peace. Building on literatures on authoritarian powersharing and co-optation, I develop a theory of informal armed coexistence that explains how regimes and rebels negotiate de facto arrangements, dividing territorial and functional authority in ways ranging from hostile toleration to strategic coordination.

To capture this variation, I introduce a novel typology and original dataset of rebel–state relations across the MENA region (1960–2020), providing a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding informal political order. Using a nested research design, the project combines cross-national and within-country statistical analysis with process tracing. A case study of Iraqi–Kurdish relations, based on extensive archival research, illuminates the causal mechanisms that shape actors’ choice between civil conflict, coexistence, and peace.

This project contributes to debates on civil war termination, hybrid governance, and authoritarian survival by showing how informal powersharing can emerge and persist without formal settlements. It speaks to broader questions of when governments seek to eliminate armed challengers, when they tolerate or appease them, and how divided sovereignty can serve as a durable tool of authoritarian violence management.

Job Market Paper

"Informal Cessation: Rethinking How Civil Wars End" Access my paper here.

When do opponents end civil conflict without formal settlement? Existing research emphasizes decisive victories and institutionalized peace agreements as prerequisites for durable peace. Yet, most civil conflicts conclude without either. This paper explains the logic behind informal cessation as an outcome of civil conflict in which armed actors remain intact and no agreement is signed. I argue that informal cessation emerges when continued fighting is costly but formal settlements suffer from severe commitment problems, or otherwise lack credible enforcement. In these contexts, both states and rebels may accept non-codified, self-enforcing bargains that do not require rebels to disarm. This gives challengers direct enforcement capacity, reducing the state’s credibility problem. But it confronts the state with a new strategic dilemma: allowing rebels to remain armed leaves open the risk of future rebellion. Managing this trade-off, informal cessation becomes more likely when rebels are relatively weak and make bounded, territorial demands. For governments, such groups pose limited risk to central authority and can be appeased with minimal concessions; for rebels with lower capabilities or bounded demands, informal deals offer acceptable partial gains. Using logistic and multinomial models on 2,158 dyad-years and 223 informal cessations (1960-2020), I find that informal cessation is significantly more likely in conflicts involving relatively weaker rebels and territorial demands, especially over peripheral or low-resource regions. This paper reframes informal outcomes not as failed resolutions, but as deliberate, enforceable alternatives to continued conflict.

Under Review

"Know Thyself: Rebel Leader Experience and Bargaining Behavior" with Juliana Tappe-Ortiz.

Why are some rebel leaders more effective negotiators than others? While some peace processes settle rapidly, others drag on for years making peace harder to achieve as conflicts and negotiations mature. Newly available data allows us to assess the effect of rebel leaders’ characteristics on negotiation dynamics and duration. We argue that combat experience of rebel leaders results in shorter negotiations as leaders better understand their group’s capabilities, and thus converge on mutually acceptable terms more quickly. We also show that combat experience mitigates how rebels bring their capabilities to bear in negotiations. We test our theory on a dataset of over 10,000 negotiation-months covering peace processes across 63 countries and territories between 1975 and 2013. Estimating cause-specific hazard models, we find that rebel leaders’ combat experience significantly decreases negotiation duration. Rebel leaders with combat experience achieve peace more rapidly regardless of their group’s relative capabilities. We contribute to a growing literature on rebel leader characteristics and shed light on previously understudied aspects of rebel behavior in civil war negotiations. Our findings contribute to the continuing debate about how and when leaders matter. Overall, this study advances an empirical research agenda focused on the role of rebel leaders in conflict processes and their negotiation behavior in particular.

Working Papers

"Coexisting with Threats: Informal Governance Arrangements in the Face of Foreign Subversion."

How do states respond to foreign efforts to subvert their domestic authority? The presence of armed non-state actors allows foreign governments to engage these as proxies and further destabilize or distract governments of weak states. While the elimination, demobilization, or integration of armed actors may remove opportunities for external states to use armed groups as proxy forces, these strategies are difficult to achieve. I posit, states use a strategy of limited appeasement resulting in informal coexistence with domestic armed groups removing external state’s ability to undermine domestic authority through local armed challengers. The threat from foreign subversion facilitates demand for informal armed power-sharing. In turn, allowing states and armed groups to coexist. To test my theory, I estimate logistic and non-parametric survival models on a large-n dataset of 365 rebel-state dyads across the Middle East and North Africa region between 1970-2012. I find the risk of foreign meddling results in informal power-sharing that can constitute lasting coexistence. This study contributes to our understanding of how states can engage with and manage the persistence of armed nonstate actors, as well as the durability of informal peace and governance arrangements.

"When Rebels Turn Pro-Government: Explaining Rebel-State Cooperation During Multi-Party Conflict."

When do rebels switch sides and align with the government during multiparty conflict? Today’s conflicts are increasingly characterized by a multiplicity of actors on both sides of a dispute. While much attention has been given to rebel side-switching across rebel alliances, the conditions for rebel side-switching to the government side remain understudied. Existing arguments focus only on groups’ willingness and capacity to side-switch and ignore governments’ incentives to accept the alliance. I argue that side-switching is most likely where the alliance offers both actors opportunities for outbidding, high expected benefits from removal of competitors, or alleviation of conflict intensity. Using Firth regression and rare events simulation on a dataset of deliberate alignment shifts during civil wars between 1989 and 2007, I find robust support for my argument. Armed groups’ resource and survival concerns alone matter little where governments benefit from intergroup competition and infighting. Expected mutual benefit rather than unilateral need is a strong predictor for rebel pro-government side-switching.

Works in Progress

"(Re)Conceptualizing International Intervention with Consent and Reform" with Aila Matanock. APSA 2025.
"Avoiding the Coup-Proofing Dilemma Through Invited Interventions" with Aila Matanock and Andrew Wojtanik. APSA 2024.
"How Weak States Govern Via Aid Networks" with Susanna Campbell and Cecilia Cavero Sanchez. APSA 2025.
"Peacekeeping Deployment and the Displacement of Violence."
"Targeting the Motivated: How Autocracies Deter Terrorism"
"Anonymous Terrorism Beyond Credit Claiming Behavior."
"Dangerous Conditions: Right-Wing Parties and Domestic Terrorism" with Jesus Rojas Venzor.