Jacob Shapiro, an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, will lead a consortium of researchers from Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego to study the impact of various international development assistance programs on terrorism and insurgency.

Shapiro and colleagues were awarded an $8.4 million grant for their study from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) as part of the agency’s Minerva Research Initiative, a university-based program focusing on “areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy," and which "seeks to increase the department’s intellectual capital in the social sciences, improve its ability to address future challenges, and build bridges between the department and the social science community,” according to a DOD statement.

The grant will support the development of new data sets on a number of historical and ongoing conflicts as well as funding pre- and post-doctoral researcher associates who will study organizations – non-state actors – that have produced violence. These research projects aim to understand when and why non-state actors compete with governments to provide community services in exchange for community loyalty.

In addition, Princeton researchers and their colleagues will work with aid agencies to systematically evaluate the impact of development and governance assistance programs by designing assistance programs in ways that allow them to track changes in violence and other indicators across regions, to see which aid activities lead to the greatest reduction in levels of violence.

Randomized or quasi-randomized evaluations are widely considered to be the most precise method to identify the immediate impact of various development assistance policies and programs. The World Bank routinely builds them into its projects, and researchers at prominent universities have used randomized evaluations to study subjects as diverse as voter turnout in the United States and development economics in rural Africa.

In the context of development programs, this method typically involves programs that cannot possibly be rolled out to all deserving individuals or communities at once, often because of budgetary constraints. By randomizing the assignment of a program across comparable units, researchers can identify causal effects by comparing outcomes in the treatment group to those in the control group.

By systematically evaluating aid programs being implemented in conflict and post-conflict environments Shapiro and colleagues hope to improve the knowledge base about the conditions under which order can be reconstructed and support for insurgent and terrorist movements undermined.

“We are especially interested in interventions that seek to improve the population’s material welfare through employment programs, infrastructure development, and improvements in basic services,” said Shapiro. “For example, theoretical work suggests that such programs can create incentives for communities to embrace existing governments and reject violent movements; at the same time, it is possible that such approaches actually strengthen the hand of violent groups by enlarging their resource base or relieving them of the burden of providing public goods on their own.”

The researchers will also examine programs that seek to counter violence or reinforce peace by strengthening governance, through capacity-building for existing local institutions such as courts, parliaments, or civil society groups; through efforts to make local governance more inclusive; or through initiatives to increase the free flow of balanced information.

“Such research is important,” Shapiro added, “because current theoretical work suggests that while such programs can lead to better representation and fewer incentives for violence, they can also foster formal, autonomous bases of power for oppositional groups that ultimately undermine governments.”

Shapiro’s other research interests include the organizational aspects of terrorism, insurgency, and security policy.