Research

My book project, provisionally titled Militia Lifecycles: Wartime Origins and Post-Conflict Governance in Weak States, addresses critical questions about civil war internal dynamics and the provision of public goods in post-conflict settings where the state is weak. It asks three central questions:

1) Why do militias emerge in some areas but not others during civil wars?
2) Why do some militias persist into post-conflict periods while others disband?
3) Under what conditions can militias improve rural governance in the wake of protracted armed conflict?

Despite the importance of militias for the internal dynamics and legacies of civil war, a comprehensive theory of their lifecycles and impact on post-conflict societies is lacking. I answer my research questions through extensive fieldwork in rural Peru, employing site-intensive methods such as interviews, archival research, and participant observation. The project includes a comparative historical analysis through process tracing of three subnational cases within Ayacucho—the epicenter of violence during Peru’s civil war (1980–2000)—to examine variation in militia formation and post-conflict trajectories.

To extend this research into a book, I am building an original dataset using archives and expert interviews to test my theory across all Peruvian districts. I am also expanding the project to investigate militias’ effects on social capital drawing comparative insights from Mexico and Guatemala.

• This paper develops a theoretical framework to explain militias’ varied trajectories after civil wars—governance strengthening, governance weakening, and disbandment. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork in Peru’s rural periphery, it shows that militias with autonomy from the military and strong community ties during wartime are more likely to persist and enhance post-war governance.

• My colleagues and I analyze the comparative politics readings assigned in PhD programs across 21 universities in nine Latin American countries. Using network analysis, we discovered that programs converge around Global North literature but diverge in their use of regional sources. This article was the centerpiece of a symposium featuring commentary by Gerardo Munck, a leading scholar in Latin American politics, along with a response from the authors.

• This article uses critical event analysis, a novel qualitative technique, to examine how leaders’ mistakes can trigger regime change. Drawing on original archival sources, we conduct a within-case analysis of Argentina’s democratic breakdown in the early 1940s, scrutinizing President Ramón S. Castillo’s errors at five critical events. Our article offers a political agency approach that emphasizes missteps over deliberate choices in explaining authoritarian reversals.

This paper examines how religious movements, particularly the Evangelical community in the Americas, support pro-authoritarian leaders who rely on populist rhetoric and socially conservative values, indirectly contributing to democratic erosion.

This paper introduces practical guidelines for interpreting evidence in context, helping strengthen causal inference in qualitative research.

This project develops a family resemblance framework to bridge fragmented literatures on civil wars, terrorism, criminal governance, and other forms of violence, enabling comparison and showing how different kinds of political violence overlap and evolve over time.