The Smith Development Lab
The Smith Lab is the developing world, encompassing the post-colonial and post-communist regions of Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Latin America and the Middle East. My PhD students and I explore a broad range of political phenomena, focused again along three broad avenues of inquiry: the economic, societal and institutional foundations of order and inclusion. Our research focuses on answering questions that focus on explaining variation in social and political outcomes. The first slide above illustrates one of those research questions, related to ethnic violence. It was taken in the Indonesian city of Surakarta or "Solo" in May 1998, in the aftermath of rioting against the city's Chinese minority. Why was Solo hit so hard by ethnic riots, whereas the city of Yogyakarta just 60 kilometers away was untouched? I co-authored an article in World Development with Rizal Panggabean of Indonesia's Gadjah Mada University in an effort to answer that question. We conducted a survey of interethnic relations in Surakarta and Yogyakarta and in-depth comparative field research in Medan, Surabaya, Surakarta, and Yogyakarta. The second slide shows the results of a counterfactual estimation I am working on with Muharrem Bagriyanik and Adam Bernstein. In this paper, we show that, at most levels of state reliance on fossil fuel revenues, oil brings a robust benefit for human development.
In yet another article in Security Studies, Hye Ryeon Jang (Morehouse) and I explored the role of oil wealth in fomenting interstate conflicts. Challenging prominent scholarship and employing a global dataset for the 1945-2010 period, we showed that the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 was singularly responsible for a "false positive" finding that there is a petro-aggression dynamic at work and that, in fact, there has been a robust oil peace since the Second World War.
You can find all of my published articles at my research page by clicking on the link above left. These are the kind of questions that motivate my research and my two main research agendas. I work on the politics of resource wealth, on ethnic politics, and on political regimes and regime change. All of this work exploits variation in the social and political worlds to find explanations for the real world puzzles that most interest me. I have developed a distinctive approach to multi-method scholarship that begins with initial theoretical insights (hunches!) drawn either from my field research experience and area studies training or, just as often, puzzling statistical trends. I work across these two methodological realms with an eye to inference. And, I teach one of our PhD program's core methods seminars, Conduct of Inquiry, which focuses on the array of logics of causal inference commonly employed in political science research.
My published research draws on cross-national statistical analysis, comparative macro-history, natural experiments, case study research and political ethnography. Which of these I employ in any given project is a function of the question at hand: I like the freedom of having no horse in the political science methods or theory debates. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, among other organizations.
The Smith Lab is the developing world, encompassing the post-colonial and post-communist regions of Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Latin America and the Middle East. My PhD students and I explore a broad range of political phenomena, focused again along three broad avenues of inquiry: the economic, societal and institutional foundations of order and inclusion. Our research focuses on answering questions that focus on explaining variation in social and political outcomes. The first slide above illustrates one of those research questions, related to ethnic violence. It was taken in the Indonesian city of Surakarta or "Solo" in May 1998, in the aftermath of rioting against the city's Chinese minority. Why was Solo hit so hard by ethnic riots, whereas the city of Yogyakarta just 60 kilometers away was untouched? I co-authored an article in World Development with Rizal Panggabean of Indonesia's Gadjah Mada University in an effort to answer that question. We conducted a survey of interethnic relations in Surakarta and Yogyakarta and in-depth comparative field research in Medan, Surabaya, Surakarta, and Yogyakarta. The second slide shows the results of a counterfactual estimation I am working on with Muharrem Bagriyanik and Adam Bernstein. In this paper, we show that, at most levels of state reliance on fossil fuel revenues, oil brings a robust benefit for human development.
In yet another article in Security Studies, Hye Ryeon Jang (Morehouse) and I explored the role of oil wealth in fomenting interstate conflicts. Challenging prominent scholarship and employing a global dataset for the 1945-2010 period, we showed that the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 was singularly responsible for a "false positive" finding that there is a petro-aggression dynamic at work and that, in fact, there has been a robust oil peace since the Second World War.
You can find all of my published articles at my research page by clicking on the link above left. These are the kind of questions that motivate my research and my two main research agendas. I work on the politics of resource wealth, on ethnic politics, and on political regimes and regime change. All of this work exploits variation in the social and political worlds to find explanations for the real world puzzles that most interest me. I have developed a distinctive approach to multi-method scholarship that begins with initial theoretical insights (hunches!) drawn either from my field research experience and area studies training or, just as often, puzzling statistical trends. I work across these two methodological realms with an eye to inference. And, I teach one of our PhD program's core methods seminars, Conduct of Inquiry, which focuses on the array of logics of causal inference commonly employed in political science research.
My published research draws on cross-national statistical analysis, comparative macro-history, natural experiments, case study research and political ethnography. Which of these I employ in any given project is a function of the question at hand: I like the freedom of having no horse in the political science methods or theory debates. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, among other organizations.