METHODS FOR RESEARCHING VIOLENCE
Confronting Selection Bias: The Normative and Empirical Risks of Data Collection in Violent Contexts
Geopolitics (2019)
with Jerome Marston
Field researchers of violence and human rights work in high-risk but low-information environments that create distinct logistical challenges. There, the probability of methodological misstep and the accompanying empirical and normative consequences are heightened. We interrogate one methodological hazard common to research in violent contexts - selection bias - and lay out clear strategies for minimizing its consequences.

POLITICS OF PUBLIC SECURITY
Who is Safe? Varieties of Security in the American City (Working paper - available upon request)
with Richard O. Snyder
The public good of local safety can be provided by a host of public, private and community agents combining in a multiplicity of ways. Using evidence gathered via subnational comparative analysis of neighborhoods within one single American city - Providence, Rhode Island - we observe striking variation in the provision of local security. To describe and explain these local varieties of security, we propose a multilateral, multilevel and subnational framework that offers a far stronger understanding not only of who is safe, but also how and why.

VIOLENCE AND CITIZEN POLITICS 
The Political Consequences of Violence: Empathy and civic action during conflict
(Working paper - available upon request)
Existing research suggests that victimization leads to increased political participation. Yet, this focus on victimization omits the most frequent citizen experience - indirect exposure to violence (i.e., via the media). Using large-n survey data from Mexico, I demonstrate that indirect exposure to violence also provokes civic engagement among non-victim citizens. I then draw on original qualitative data to explore potential explanations for this relationship. I argue that empathy for victims of violence motivates civic engagement among non-victims. 

Violent Civic Responsibility: Vigilantism in Mexico 
(Working paper - available upon request)
What explains participation in vigilante movements? Unlike existing theories that emphasize self-help survival behaviors, I leverage large-n survey data from Mexico to show that individual factors associated with support for vigilantism mirror those associated with nonviolent civic engagement. This study thus revises how we understand vigilante movements by emphasizing the political underpinnings of vigilantism and re-framing vigilantism as a political choice, rather than a survival strategy.

VIOLENCE AND CONFLICT PROCESSES
Overkill: Understanding spectacle violence during conflict
(Working Paper - available upon request)
with Jerome Marston
This article advances a new conceptual category of violence, “overkill,” which describes acts of violence whose aim seems to surpass the goal of killing alone. We use quantitative data from Colombia and Mexico to show that, as a subcategory of conflict violence, overkill has distinct drivers and consequences for conflict trajectories.