Please see my SSRN page here, or email me for working papers.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Article
No Easy Way Out: The Effect of Military Coups on State Repression (Journal of Politics, forthcoming)
Military coups are often advocated as solutions for ending state-sponsored atrocities. Yet, we know little about coups' precise consequences. This article estimates the effect of coups on state repression by exploiting the element of chance in whether an attempted coup succeeds or fails. Contrary to popular views of coups as remedies against repressive autocrats, I find no evidence that coups have a pacifying effect on state repression. Rather, coups appear to make matters worse, even when targeting leaders that commit large-scale human rights violations. This article contributes to studies of political violence, authoritarianism, and civil-military relations, by resolving a longstanding "good coup vs. bad coup" debate. It also advances literature on coups and their consequences through an innovative empirical design that leverages exogenous variation in coup outcomes, combined with an extreme bounds analysis, overcoming conventional challenges of causal inference using observational data.
Work in Progress
The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes Since 1990 (with Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, under review)
This paper explores the causes of authoritarian durability. Why do some authoritarian regimes survive for decades, often despite severe crises, while others collapse quickly, even absent significant challenges? Based on an analysis of all authoritarian regimes since 1900, we argue that regimes that emerge out of violent social revolution are especially durable. Revolutionary regimes such as those in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam endured for more than a half a century in the face of strong external pressure, poor economic performance, and large-scale policy failures. We develop and test a theory that accounts for such durability using a novel dataset of revolutionary regimes. We contend that autocracies that emerge out of violent social revolution confront extraordinary military threats, which lead to the development of cohesive ruling parties, powerful and loyal security apparatuses, as well as the destruction of alternative power centers. These characteristics account for revolutionary regimes’ unusual longevity.
The Backlash Constraint (working paper)
In the face of mass mobilization, when do authoritarian regimes kill civilians in large numbers; and when do they concede to protesters’ demands? This paper investigates the causes of civilian massacres committed by authoritarian regimes. Unlike recent scholarship that focuses on the coercive capacity of the state, I draw attention to how “backlash” shapes a regime’s choices to exercise repression. I define backlash as the sudden and unmanageable broadening of political mobilization to previously non-mobilized sectors of society. My main argument is that the possibility of backlash imposes a constraint on authoritarian regimes’ actions and raises their expected costs of repression. In turn, these costs encourage regimes to seek non-violent ways out of crises. I present a formal model that delineates the conditions under which the backlash constraint is effective at dissuading an authoritarian regime from using repression, and the contexts in which this constraint is lifted, thus generating predictions for when massacres are most likely to occur. I then test the plausibility of the argument through an in-depth analysis of civilian massacres that took place in Cairo, Egypt, on August 14th, 2013, when security forces killed hundreds of protesters in a few hours. The analysis supports the claim that authoritarian regimes take into account possibilities that repression may backfire before repressing civilians, and suggests that these concerns are attenuated in situations of acute political polarization, when the risk of backlash is low among civilian sectors that are important for regime survival.
Book Chapter
“Puissance et vulnérabilité de l’appareil sécuritaire égyptien.” In Soulèvements populaires et recompositions politiques dans le Monde arabe. Eds. Frédéric Vairel and Michel Camau. Montréal, Canada: University of Montreal Press, 2014.
Other Publications
“Why did Egyptian security see Giulio Regeni as a threat? ” The Monkey Cage, Washington Post, March 7, 2016.
“Crisis, Coercion, and Authoritarian Durability: Explaining Diverging Responses to Anti-Regime Protest in Egypt and Iran.” With Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way. Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law CDDRL Working Paper, Vol. 127, December 2012.
“Lessons from Egypt’s Tax Collectors.” Middle East Report (MERIP): 264, 2012.
“Preheating with Non-Standard Kinetic Term.” With Robert H. Brandenberger. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). 4:20, 2009 (peer-reviewed, physics).
“Crisis, Coercion, and Authoritarian Durability: Explaining Diverging Responses to Anti-Regime Protest in Egypt and Iran.” With Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way. Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law CDDRL Working Paper, Vol. 127, December 2012.
“Lessons from Egypt’s Tax Collectors.” Middle East Report (MERIP): 264, 2012.
“Preheating with Non-Standard Kinetic Term.” With Robert H. Brandenberger. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). 4:20, 2009 (peer-reviewed, physics).