Dissertation
Postdoctoral Fellow, Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, Harvard University
Postdoctoral Fellow, Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania
Politics of Environmental Displacement
This project investigates the political causes and consequences of environmental displacement. As part of this project, I constructed the Natural Hazards and Internal Displacement dataset, an original dataset that identifies dislocations caused by floods, storms, wildfires, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic activity in Africa from 1989-2017. The dataset is currently being expanded to include Latin America and the Caribbean.
Substantively, this project takes two directions. First, it examines why countries exhibit such high variation in environmental displacement in the aftermath of sudden-onset natural hazards with an emphasis on national political institutions. A second set of questions addresses the relationship between environmental displacement and political violence.
Manuscripts:
Chesler, A. "Environmental Displacement and Political Instability: Evidence from Africa." Under review.
Triggers of Mass Killing
Co-researchers: Ernesto Verdeja, Paul Brenner, Patrick Regan
This project conducts a theoretical and empirical investigation into the triggers of state-led mass killing. While prior research has generated rich insights into the conditions under which these atrocities are most likely to erupt, we focus on identifying the discrete events and sequences of events--triggers--that catalyze the decision to commit civilian massacres. This interdisciplinary project blends insights from political science, methods from computational social science, and statistical techniques from climate science to shed new light on the triggering effects of contentious political events such as protests, coups, assassinations, political turnover, violent conflict, and more.
Manuscripts:
Burley, T., Humble, L., Sleeper, C., Sticha, A., Chesler, A., Regan, P., Ernesto, V., & Brenner, P. (2020). NLP Workflows for Computational Social Science: Understanding Triggers of State-Led Mass Killings. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (pp. 152-159).
Chesler, A. "Quantifying Triggers of Mass Killing with Event Coincidence Analysis." Working paper.
Provincial Leaders in the World
Who governs provinces around the world? Yet we know little about the political executives that This project is in the early stages and involves the construction of a panel dataset on subnational governing executives around the world from 1989-present. Data collection is currently underway.
Education
University name. Click to edit
2010 - present
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University name. Click to edit
2010 - present
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me and you can start adding your own content and make changes to the font. Feel free to drag and drop me anywhere you like on your page. I’m a great place for you to write more. Tell a story about yourself.