Political Science

Intellectual Merit: The project is important to US national security interests because it addresses economic coercion that undermines democracy. Scholars have long recognized that rulers in non democracies can extend their tenure by subverting elections, focusing on ballot-box fraud, repression, turnout-buying, vote buying, patronage spending, and the co-optation of opposition elites. However, they have largely overlooked one prominent form of electoral subversion in contemporary hybrid regimes: the coercive mobilization of voters by employers.

This dissertation examines the political impact of return migration after civil war. Violence wrought by civil war forces millions of people to flee their homes. While scholars have demonstrated how these population movements can spread and exacerbate conflict, return-migration is assumed to be a purely logistical issue. Once the war is over, people will simply return home and pick up where they left off. Yet, conflict between returning and non-migrant populations is a nearly ubiquitous issue for post-conflict societies from South Sudan to Iraq and Rwanda.