RESEARCH

My research examines organizational behavior and social change in war- and disaster-affected contexts. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, I use ethnographic, interview-based, and archival methods to study how actors such as military organizations (state and non-state), civilian bureaucracies, and humanitarian agencies cope with crisis, disruption, and fragmentation. Using a relational lens grounded by social network theory, I am particularly interested in examining how interactions between formal organizational hierarchies and actors’ quotidian networks—that is, their everyday kinship, friendship, and other social ties— shape organizational knowledge, decision-making, and evolution. My publications examine civil war and political violence, organizational politics, forced migration, the politics of disaster, and qualitative research methods. I am currently studying how states conceptualize and plan for emergencies. You can read more about my past and ongoing projects below.

PROJECTS

Poster at a Palestine Liberation Organization cultural event in the Biq'a Valley.

Militant OrganizationS' Adaptation and resilience

Based on two years of ethnographic, interview-based, and archival research among Palestinian militant groups in Lebanon, my research explores how these groups evolve during and following conflict. Focusing on the question of organizational emergence--e.g., why some groups successfully develop sub-divisions such as smuggling apparatuses and institutions such as inter-group alliances--this work also applies relational approaches to better understand processes of mobilization, recruitment, socialization, polarization, and disciplinary breakdown. I am particularly interested in examining how regionalized patterns of violence influence multiple network dynamics and in tracing the long term social changes that result.

This project has received generous funding from the Palestinian American Research Center, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Water and sanitation facilities provided by an aid group for internally displaced persons in a village north of Mosul

Humanitarianism, forced migration, and ethics

Since 2012, I have been studying the politics of emergency response. One strand of this work centers on the unexpected political and policy consequences of refugees' and internally displaced persons' interactions with humanitarian bureaucracies, local governments, and host populations. A POMEPS Travel-Research-Engagement grant funded my 2014 fieldwork on the politics of Syrian refugees' access to social services such as healthcare and education in Lebanon. I am also part of a multi-national, DFID/ESRC/MRC/Wellcome Health-funded project on refugees’ integration into national healthcare systems in Lebanon, Jordan, and Uganda.

A second thread of scholarship, on ethical communities of practice in settings of war and humanitarian crisis, examines the emergence of everyday ethical practices and the negotiation of ethical challenges in conflict-adjacent professional fields. This research has produced articles on the political economy of crisis research and on ecological factors that contribute to sexual violence in humanitarian communities. An Exploration of Practical Ethics Grant awarded to myself and Valerie deKoeijer (Leiden University) through JHU's Berman Institute of Bioethics supported our fieldwork in Uganda and Iraq.

research methods, ethics, and preparedness

Working in and adjacent to conflict zones requires an ethical sensibility and practical know-how. I have written several pieces on the challenges and responsibilities involved with conducting research in these environments.

Dr. Milli Lake (LSE) and I founded the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium and Workshop in 2018. The curriculum focuses on preparing scholars for the intellectual, ethical, physical, and psychological demands of research in violent and violence-adjacent settings.