My research focuses primarily on how state leaders and the public respond to nearby threats. My dissertation considers how states respond to civil war violence in a neighboring state. More specifically, I study the effect of nearby civil conflict on leader survival, determinants of external involvement, and the effect of both internal and external factors on choosing a side to support. Unlike traditional studies of civil war intervention, which tend to focus primarily on the external interventions of powerful states into the conflict, I focus on neighbor state responses. The neighbors of civil war states are both uniquely vulnerable to civil war externalities and uniquely capable of responding with a diverse range of policy choices. Those policy choices are not limited to external intervention, as many responses to civil war violence nearby involve adjustments in domestic policy.
My dissertation presents a theory of leader survival, threat perception, and civil war response. I look at the unique threats to regime survival experienced by civil war neighbors in an attempt to better understand both the policy options available to such leaders as well as whether internal policies, external policies, or a combination of both are chosen in response to the conflict. I test my theory using a mixture of quantitative analysis of civil war neighbors from 1945 to 2010 and qualitative case studies of selected states’ responses to nearby civil conflict.
In the summer of 2017 I received the Schroeder Summer Fellowship from the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois, Working with staff at the center, I used event data on policy responses to neighboring states to examine how state leaders signal support to one side or another in a nearby civil war. This collaboration was invaluable in terms of working on my dissertation, and I plan to use both the data resources and other resources from the center in my research moving forward.