Raed Aldulaimi – Al-Imam Al-Adham College University
Dahab Aglan – University of Oxford

When communities try to rebuild after war, they face a difficult question: how do you live alongside neighbors whose family members may have been on the opposing side of the conflict? In post-ISIL Iraq, many families who fled the fighting, because a family member joined ISIL, are now trying to return home. However, a major puzzle remains: even when two towns have the exact same religion, ethnicity, and/or (perhaps) tribal affiliation, one town might welcome returning families back, while a neighboring town responds with anger, social rejection, or even violence.

This project investigates why these differences happen. To find answers, we aim to study six communities across three key provinces in Iraq where ISIL had almost full control 2014-2017: Anbar, Ninewa, and Salah al-Deen. We are using a dual approach to gather data. First, we conduct ~90 in-depth interviews (in total) with local tribal and community leaders, officials, and returned IDPs to hear their personal experiences and perspectives on safety, justice, and forgiveness. Second, we generate a novel dataset by designing survey questionnaires with ~480 participants (in total) to measure how specific factors—like shared tribes, religious differences, or the levels of violence a town suffered—affect people’s willingness to accept returnees.

Ultimately, this study looks at how local traditions and shared experiences can either help or hinder peace. By understanding what makes reconciliation successful in one town versus another, we aim to provide practical, evidence-based recommendations for local leaders and international organizations working to rebuild safe, united communities after conflict ends.

Junbeom (Paul) Bahk – University of California, Los Angeles

Why do some low-income individuals oppose government welfare programs, contrary to what standard political economy theories predict? This project argues that an important source of political conflict exists within the poor themselves. Because welfare programs use different eligibility criteria, some low-income individuals receive benefits while others are excluded. These eligibility boundaries can shape how people evaluate welfare policies and their willingness to support particular programs. I argue that low-income individuals may oppose welfare programs when they are excluded from benefits provided to other disadvantaged groups. When people perceive that others in similar economic circumstances receive benefits that they do not, they may become less supportive of those policies because they believe the system treats them unfairly and lowers their relative standing. Using large-scale survey data from multiple countries, this project examines how eligibility for different welfare programs creates cleavages within the poor. More broadly, the project contributes to our understanding of welfare politics by showing that the preferences of low-income individuals are not uniform, but instead depend on how welfare programs distribute benefits across different groups.

Mostafa El Sharkawy – University of Michigan

Every Friday, millions of Muslims around the world listen to a sermon delivered by their local religious cleric. In many countries, including Kuwait, those sermons are written by the government, one way for the state to ensure that what gets said from the pulpit stays within acceptable bounds. But what happens when that cleric takes to social media and posts about politics? This project studies the political lives of Muslim religious scholars in Kuwait. These clerics hold official government positions, receive state salaries, and are expected to stay out of politics. And yet, when analyzing millions of social media posts made by Kuwaiti clerics since 2010, I find that clerics do engage in political speech in ways that criticize the state and that they strategically pick their moments and say very different things on social media than they do in the mosque. Some clerics have publicly supported protest movements. Others have condemned them in religious terms. Many stay quiet most of the time, but speak up during significant politically contentious events, like a parliamentary crisis or a protest movement. And almost all of them use noticeably different language on their personal accounts than in the government-written sermons they deliver each week. The broader implication of this research is that governments that employ religious leaders don’t necessarily control what those leaders think or say at all times. Religious authority has its own roots in a form of social trust and knowledge operating at a community-level which are harder to manage than a salary or a job title.

Fatih Erol – University of Idaho

Researchers often want to know what really drives people’s choices, like which political candidate they would vote for, or which immigrants they think should be allowed into the country. One way to study this is a conjoint experiment, which usually shows people two options side by side each described by a short list of traits, and asks them to pick the one they prefer. Repeat this enough times, randomly shuffling each profile’s features, and you can measure how much any single trait, such as a candidate’s party or job skills, tips people’s decisions. Yet there is a problem we have never seen directly. These options can be packed with details, and people do not always read them all. Some lock onto one trait and ignore the rest. Others quietly skip past things they care about. My project builds a tool to watch this happen. I hide each detail behind a button people must click to reveal, so every click is recorded. That gives me the trace of what each person looked at before deciding. Across two experiments, this will show, trait by trait, when the usual findings hold up and when they rest on information most people never glanced at.

Ziyi (Amanda) Fu – Northwestern University

In the broadest sense, I study women revolutionaries who challenged what politics could be. I focus on East Asia in the early twentieth century, when Chinese thinkers and activists were grappling with a big question: how do we modernize without losing cultural or national autonomy?

Many women approached this question differently: if we aren’t loyal first and foremost to a patriarchal nation, then what kind of future are we fighting for? Often, their answers predicated political revolutions on the institutions of everyday life—sexuality, marriage, and the family. These women reimagined intimacy as a site of political change, decolonization, and liberation.

They contradicted their male colleagues on the one hand, spotlighting the male chauvinist basis of the nation-state. And they criticized their western counterparts on the other, insisting that women’s liberation could not be thought apart from real decolonization.
It is no wonder that these minority voices were often ignored, and their legacies thus eclipsed, especially since the wave of independence movements in 1950s, the decline of the Non-Alignment movement, and the rise of neoliberal feminism.
Hopefully, I show that they provide so much for us to rethink our contemporary post-sexual liberation moment, that the fantasies of personal fulfillment and individual autonomy haven’t gotten us very far, and that renewed efforts at women’s liberation could come from imaginaries of decolonization.

Anna Gaudet – University of Aberdeen

Political discourse increasingly occurs within and is shaped by social media environments and their algorithmic affordances which favor provocative, emotionally charged, and morally framed content. As a result, the use of gender-based disinformation (GBD), a form of gender-based violence, has been found to disproportionately impact women politicians online, creating significant barriers to their presence in digital spaces and representation within democratic processes. Despite growing recognition within recent scholarship of the broader societal harms caused by GBD, limited attention has been paid to the underlying mechanisms driving its production, intended effects, and dissemination on social media. Therefore, this doctoral research evaluates GBD content from Reddit directed toward nine women politicians during the 2024 US election period in correlation to the mutually constitutive constructs of emotion and morals. Funding provided by the APSA Centennial Center will support a dictionary-based approach to measuring the extent to which emotion, moral and moral-emotion words appear within GBD content, whether these variables influence levels of engagement with such content, and the context in which these constructs are deployed. In doing so, this project will contribute towards a deeper understanding of the technological and communicative dynamics which normalize forms of gender-based violence, such as GBD, within contemporary political discourse and undermine women’s equal participation in democratic societies.

Elsa Khwaja – Independent Unaffiliated Scholar

The success or failure of international aid programs in crisis zones increasingly depends on the strength of organizational and individual relationships. This project investigates how networks connecting international donors, governments, civil society groups, and local communities interact to produce development outcomes in challenging environments, with focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Exploring aid impact beyond financial budgets, this research treats development as a web of connections and a complex living system of relationships. It highlights the role of trust, local knowledge, and storytelling in real-world outcomes. The project explores how international funding can either strengthen local governance or unintentionally undermine community leadership and resilience, revealing how power operates across formal organizations and individual actors.

The research is built on substantive fieldwork, featuring over 200 interviews conducted with stakeholders across Pakistan, Washington DC, and remotely for Afghanistan. This rich body of firsthand data informs two main areas of inquiry. The first examines how the international community can better support successful, long-lasting, locally led development. The second reflects on the practical realities of conducting fieldwork in challenging settings. Focusing on Pakistan, it explores how trust-building, relationships, institutional networks, personal identity, and storytelling influence how we collect, interpret, and communicate knowledge across cultures and geographies.

This research provides a practical roadmap for policymakers, educators, students, and practitioners. By emphasizing trust, social inclusion, and local voices, it presents relevant insights on how the international development community can work alongside local actors to design programs that create lasting and positive change on the ground.

Ryan Liou – Wabash College

Economic sanctions are meant to pressure governments into changing their behavior. Yet sanctions often backfire by generating rally-around-the-flag effects: instead of turning citizens against their leaders, they can strengthen public support for the government by encouraging people to blame foreign powers for their hardships. My project argues that these reactions are not experienced equally. During economic crises, women often bear a greater share of household work, finding affordable food, stretching budgets, securing medicine, and caring for family members. These experiences may make government efforts to shift blame onto foreign actors less persuasive. A woman who has spent hours searching for cooking oil or medicine may have a harder time accepting the claim that the country’s problems come from abroad. To test this idea, I conduct a survey experiment in Turkey, a country facing both economic hardship and a highly gendered division of household labor. The study examines whether women are less likely than men to rally behind the government under sanctions, whether this difference depends on the type of sanctions imposed, and whether government messaging can reduce it. By examining how sanctions are experienced differently by women and men, the project shows how gendered responsibilities inside the household can shape political reactions to economic pressure. More broadly, it suggests that the citizens who bear the greatest day-to-day costs of sanctions may not interpret those costs in the same way as those less directly exposed to them.

Muzhi Liu – Columbia University

For most of the last century, Americans got political news from a small number of national sources, so even when we disagreed about politics we mostly shared the same basic facts — including whether the economy was doing well or badly. Today most people, especially young people, get news from social media, where the information environment is characterized by personalized feeds, short videos, and individual creators. My project asks what that shift does to our shared sense of economic reality. In national survey data, I find that social media doesn’t simply scatter opinions at random; rather, it tends to pull people who oppose the party in power into tight agreement — all converging on the same story that the economy is bad — while leaving supporters of the governing party spread widely apart. This grant funds the next step: an online experiment that shows people a realistic but controlled social-media feed about the economy. The feed holds the actual economic facts fixed while changing how the news is delivered — whether it arrives as one consistent message or a jumble of conflicting clips, and whether it comes from creators who feel like part of the viewer’s own online world or from a neutral, official-looking source. By measuring not just what people believe about the economy, and how widely their views spread, the experiment tests whether the format of social-media news, rather than the facts it conveys, is what pushes people apart or pulls them together. 

Prakhar Misra – Johns Hopkins University

In today’s India, queues for government jobs are extremely long but the government itself is surprisingly small. In recent years, up to 15 million candidates have competed annually for around 63,000 public posts, while roughly one‑quarter of central government positions and about one‑third of posts in large states like Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka remain empty. My work looks inside this mismatch between crowded exam halls and vacant government offices.

The project combines large datasets on vacancies, recruitment and litigation with interviews and surveys of bureaucrats and job‑seekers. I find that permanent, exam‑based hiring has become a “hyper‑compliance” process: every step is designed to ensure fairness, but together they produce long delays, frequent court challenges, and cancelled exams. Rather than fixing this system, state governments have quietly built a parallel workforce of contractual and outsourced employees, who can be hired faster, at lower cost, and with more discretion. By following both sides of this story—the queues of aspirants and the spread of contracts—my dissertation shows how India’s recruitment rules are unintentionally reshaping its bureaucracy and the way public services are delivered.

Betul Ozturan – Boston College

Abstract: When a civil war ends, why do some countries manage to build governments that hold together, while others slide right back into fighting? My research looks at one piece of that puzzle that often gets overlooked: the relationships between the armed groups themselves.

In a war like Syria’s, there isn’t just one rebel side. There are dozens of groups, and they’re constantly shifting between cooperating and turning on each other. I think the shape of those rivalries and alliances during the war helps determine what kind of peace is even possible afterward. Groups that build broad alliances tend to end up at the negotiating table. Groups surrounded by rivals tend not to.

A detail that turns out to matter a lot is direction. It’s not enough to know that two groups had a relationship. You want to know who reached out to whom, and who attacked whom, because a one-sided overture is a very different thing from mutual trust. Most existing data flattens this out, so I’m building a tool that reads through large volumes of global news coverage and uses AI to recover it, mapping who did what to whom and how the whole web shifted year by year from 2011 to 2024.

The bigger goal is to make this tool available to other researchers so it can be pointed at other conflicts too, like Yemen, Libya, or Sudan. Understanding how armed groups relate to each other is a first step toward understanding how wars actually end.

Milena Petrovic – Tulane University

What prevents politicians in advanced democracies from altering the rules of the economy to address market failures? Political economists often argue that major economic reforms are rare because elected leaders are constrained by powerful vested interests and by increasing returns from the economic models their countries already rely on. When major reforms do happen, they are usually explained as responses to pressure from powerful interest groups or changing voter demands. These assumptions make it difficult to account for some of the biggest economic policy shifts of the past two decades. Why have countries long associated with free-market capitalism, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, recently embraced government-led industrial policy? Why did Germany adopt a constitutional “debt brake”, limiting future governments’ ability to borrow and invest, even without clear pressure from business or labor groups? This project argues that we ought to pay closer attention to bureaucrats and their ideas to understand institutional change under advanced capitalism. I argue that bureaucrats can shape institutional change by controlling how economic problems are understood, deciding which experts are heard during policy debates, and using administrative procedures to privilege certain reform options over others. I test this argument through comparative analysis of major fiscal, labor, and industrial reforms in Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United States, drawing on over sixty interviews with policy elites as well as archival research.

Polina Protozanova – George Washington University

Does state indoctrination work? Building on theories of social desirability and preference falsification, I argue that while propaganda is effective in changing public preferences, it has little effect on political behavior or private preferences. This distinction is crucial: autocrats deploy propaganda not as an end in itself, but to achieve tangible goals, like fostering military readiness and resilience to outside information. To test this causally, I plan to conduct an original survey experiment in Russia, leveraging the introduction of a mandatory propaganda class in public schools. Comparing adjacent birth cohorts who narrowly differed in exposure to the class isolates the causal effect of ideological instruction. I theorize that treated cohorts will express significantly stronger patriotic sentiments than their untreated counterparts, yet both groups will be equally unwilling to act on those sentiments when doing so carries a cost. This project contributes to the literature on the bases of authoritarian resilience.

Guillermo Sardi – CUNY Graduate Center

Some democracies do not die in one dramatic coup. They are bent, step by step, by leaders who learn to turn existing rules to their advantage.

My research asks why this happens where non-state armed violence and abusive state force had already shaped everyday life under democracy. The central idea is simple: when gangs, militias, and militarized policing become part of democratic politics, they can become tools for leaders who want fewer limits on their power. These tools can make democratic decline faster and deeper than in places where such violence was not already woven into political life. An elected president may quietly bargain with criminal groups to win a pivotal election or foster armed militias to intimidate opponents. The same president may also wage a war on crime, promising order while expanding the military’s role, weakening courts, and treating critics as criminals.

These strategies raise the stakes of politics. Elections become less fair. Emergency measures become less bounded and temporary. And when traditional political actors cannot stop the process, other actors—economic elites, criminal groups, and security forces—enter the struggle. Their responses can produce sudden confrontations that open the door to deeper authoritarian change. At that point, leaders not only weaken democracy; they reshape the state’s security apparatus to hold onto power.

I study this process through Venezuela and El Salvador, with shorter comparisons to Guatemala and Colombia. Through mixed methods, the project shows how democracies are dismantled through political and criminal violence—and what future reformers need to rebuild them.

Prince Selorm Tetteh – University of Alabama

My project examines why some individuals decide to participate in counterprotests in sub-Saharan Africa. While there are several studies on individuals’ participation in counterprotests in developed countries, less is known about the nature of counterprotests in Africa. Using a panel survey, I employ a vignette experimental design to examine under what conditions individuals are more likely to participate in counterprotests in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. With this, I present respondents with possible scenarios of a protest event and ask whether they are likely to participate in a counterprotest. A counter-protest is when people gather to demonstrate against another protest, usually because they disagree with the original protest’s aims or tactics. For my findings, I expect that protests lasting more than a week and affecting people’s livelihoods are more likely to attract counterprotests than those that do not. Secondly, I expect that protests seeking to alter socio-cultural practices and beliefs are more likely to face counterprotests when there is a credible concern that lawmakers will respond favorably with policy concessions, such as by amending existing laws. More broadly, my research contributes to studies on mass mobilization and contentious politics by providing individual-level data on motivations and tactics of countermobilizations. Beyond providing insights to human rights advocacy groups promoting minority status, this study will be beneficial for security apparatus as they provide security to protesters, and for understanding which kinds of protests are likely to attract counterprotests.

Muhammed Topcu – Georgia State University

My dissertation studies false optimism: the gap between what leaders expect when they start a war and what actually happens once the war begins. Russia expected its 2022 invasion of Ukraine to be over within days; the United States expected a short and inexpensive operation in Iraq in 2003. Misjudgments of this kind have long been considered one of the main causes of war, since a war whose course could be foreseen would be much harder to start. What is less understood is their content: what exactly leaders are wrong about. A leader can misjudge the enemy’s military strength, the enemy government’s will to resist, the population’s readiness to fight back, the reactions of other states, the war’s cost, or its length. These are different mistakes, and I argue that the purpose of a war shapes which of them its initiator is most likely to make: territorial conquest, regime change, and intervention in a civil war each produce their own typical misjudgments. To test this, I collected leaders’ documented pre-war expectations from war plans, internal discussions, and memoirs, and compared them with actual outcomes across 137 decisions to go to war between 1823 and 2022. The aim is to identify where leaders’ optimism concentrates and which expectations deserve the closest scrutiny before they choose war.

Jacob Turner – Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Around the world, cities are taking a leading role in policy areas important for the day-to-day lives of their citizens, sometimes standing at odds with regional or national governments. In Brazil, where criminal violence remains a central concern for citizens, local governments have begun to experiment with a broad range of violence reduction policy alternatives from forming and expanding repressive local police forces to building extensive social support networks designed to combat the root causes of violence. These local experiments have turned pioneer cities into policy laboratories, informing decisionmakers and policy reforms across the country and at all levels of government. The Centennial Grant will support visits to three field sites across Brazil where I will document the range of policies being implemented and interview local leaders to understand why cities innovate, how local violence prevention programs are designed, and how these localized policies are transforming the crime control policy debate in national politics. This project will highlight the importance of local-level leadership in the policy reform process, showing that big ideas can come from small places.