Book manuscript
The Logic of Terrorist Propaganda
What do militant movements actually say—and which appeals move people to act?
This book compares how movements across ideologies communicate. It distinguishes between doctrine, the order a movement says it wants to build, and desire, the belonging, honor, and status it offers potential recruits.
The project brings scattered and short-lived material into a common frame, pairing public communications with internal records, social media, and interviews with civilians who lived under militant rule.
Research areas
Ideas, pressure, and evidence
I connect the language movements use with the political and material conditions under which they operate.
Mobilization and communication
How ideology and appeals to belonging, honor, identity, and status help movements reach and retain supporters.
States and organizational adaptation
How force, border fortification, sanctions, proscription, and platform policies change movement strategy.
Computational political methodology
Multilingual text analysis, open-source investigation, networks, geospatial data, and research design.
Selected work
Publications
Gateways to White Nationalism: Leaders’ Online Rhetoric and Follower Engagement
Uses eighteen million Twitter and Gab posts to study how leaders shape follower attention and how gendered rhetoric can act as a gateway to more racialized content.
Military Power and Ideological Appeals of Religious Extremists
Shows how jihadi groups shift between religious and secular appeals as their military position changes.
Population Displacement and State-Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan
Traces the long-run political consequences of nineteenth-century Pashtun resettlement in northern Afghanistan.
Historical Border Changes, State Building, and Contemporary Trust in Europe
Links centuries of shifting borders to contemporary differences in social and political trust across Europe.
Topics, Concepts, and Measurement: A Crowdsourced Procedure for Validating Topics as Measures
Develops practical tools for testing whether computational topic models measure the concepts researchers intend.
How State Presence Leads to Civil Conflict
Finds that extending state reach into peripheral regions can provoke resistance in the short term, especially where local authority is already established.
The Gravity of Transnational Terrorism
Adapts the structural gravity model to explain and predict cross-border flows of terrorist attacks.