Reintegrating Rebel Collaborators After Conflict: Experimental Evidence from Mosul, Iraq

Thursday, February 7, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Speaker/Performer: 
Kristen Kao, Mara Revkin
Horchow Hall (HRCH ), 103 (GM Room) See map
55 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

After having received her PhD in Political Science at UCLA in 2015, Kristen Kao moved to Sweden to take a position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg. Her dissertation research employs a mixed method approach and a novel dataset to explore how autocrats utilize elections to maintain ethnically splintered political support through redistribution. She analyzes the full parliamentary election results of Jordan from 1989-2013, leveraging historical shifts between three different types of electoral institutions to examine their effect on the formation of successful voter coalitions. Constituent service casework logs of parliamentarians containing thousands of requests they make on behalf of their constituents to the regime and over 150 interviews collected during fieldwork in Jordan provide evidence that multimember districts are engender tribal voting and ethnic favoritism in parliamentary provision of state goods and services in contrast to single member districts where parliamentarians cobbled together more ethnically diverse support coalitions and tribalism does not explain their service provision patterns.

Mara Revkin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Yale University and an Islamic Law & Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School, from which she received her J.D. Her research examines state-building, lawmaking, and governance by armed groups with a current focus on the case of the Islamic State. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she will be collecting data for her dissertation in Turkey and Iraq supported by the U.S. Institute for Peace as a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar. Mara is a member of the New York State Bar Association and is also working on research projects concerning the legal status of civilians who have lived in areas controlled and governed by terrorist groups. She is currently the lead researcher on Syria for United Nations University’s forthcoming study on Children in Extreme Violence.

203-432-0061