Current projects

My research program asks a question at the center of modern war: why do combatants destroy the things civilians need to survive? And what happens afterward? I pursue these questions through three connected projects. 

Targeting the systems on which civilians depend. 

Wars are usually counted in battles won and lives lost. But some of war's deadliest violence works indirectly: when an attacker cuts a city's power, its water treatment stops, its hospitals go dark, and its homes go cold. Using an original, facility-level dataset of infrastructure attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, this project develops a new way to measure how combatants attack infrastructure: destroying a facility outright, temporarily knocking it out, severing its connections to the wider network, disabling its control systems, or deliberately sparing it. These choices, unavailable in existing conflict datasets, shape how many civilians suffer, how severely, and for how long. Current work extends this framework to Russia's attacks on Ukraine's energy grid since 2022. 

Salting the Earth: The Deliberate Destruction of Life-Support Systems in War. 

Three out of every four wars in history have been fought to control territory. Yet combatants have just as persistently destroyed the very territory they were fighting over, by burning fields, poisoning wells, breaching dams, and, more recently, switching off the power stations that pump the water and heat the homes. This book explains a behavior that is at once puzzling and recurrent: the deliberate destruction of the systems that keep civilians alive, whether those systems are natural or engineered. When combatants attack what a population drinks, eats, and heats with, they attack the population, and the human toll can outlast the war. The book argues that the choice is territorial and forward-looking: combatants destroy what they never expect to own and spare what they expect to keep. It further argues that the consequences of the attacks often depend on the structure of the targeted system. Comparing episodes from the Romans' decision to salt the soil of Carthage in 146 BC to the targeting of dams and the electrical grid in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the book asks why this destruction has persisted for so long and in so many parts of the world, and how it migrated from the well to the pumping station without changing its logic. It does so by drawing on political science, history, law, biology, and psychology.

The Price of Ruin: How the World Put a Value on the Environment Destroyed by War.

When a war ends, who decides what was lost — and what does the answer reveal about how the world values different kinds of harm? Between 1991 and 2005 the United Nations Compensation Commission attempted something never tried before at this scale: adjudicating, in dollars, what a war had done to the natural world. Governments claimed roughly $85 billion for the environmental destruction of the 1991 Gulf War — the burning oil fields, the oil poured into the Persian Gulf, the torn desert, the fouled aquifers, the damaged health. The Commission's environmental panel recommended $5.3 billion, to be paid out of Iraq's own oil revenue under a liability Iraq never accepted.

The Price of Ruin is the first comprehensive account of that episode. It argues that compensation institutions do not remove politics from environmental loss; they translate it — and everything depends on the rules of translation. Reading the Commission's entire adjudicated record, the book traces how losses closest to documented, invoiced expenditure survived the process while the losses most central to human and natural life disappeared through rules about paperwork. It rests on a complete, paragraph-by-paragraph reading of that record, on archival research in Geneva and in American and claimant-state collections, and on oral histories with the people who made these decisions and lived with them.

The Commission is now invoked as a template by the Council of Europe's Register of Damage for Ukraine and by the negotiators of the climate Loss and Damage Fund — both building on its reputation rather than on its record. What those institutions are actually inheriting is part of what this book is about.

The IR Lab @ Amherst College, which I direct, is working on this very project. 

Please email me if you want to connect on this project or see the latest version.