Alexandra Chinchilla

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Political Science

DemocracyDemocracy is more central to NATO’s identity now than ever. President Joseph BidenBiden, Joseph R. Jr. has referred to the war in UkraineUkraine as part of ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy’.

Why do some militias bandwagon with the state during a civil war while others resist state authority? A formal model highlighting the role of material incentives treats militia commanders as rent-seekers competing for security sector jobs run by civilians. Western donors can send aid to inflate the size of the pie that civilians distribute to milit...

This forum provides an outlet for an assessment of research on the delegation of war to non-state armed groups in civil wars. Given the significant growth of studies concerned with this phenomenon over the last decade, this forum critically engages with the present state of the field. First, we canvass some of the most important theoretical develop...

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We asses...

Did NATO expansion foster democratic development in Eastern Europe? Past scholarship offers conflicting answers to this question. We seek to bring clarity by focusing on the 2004 NATO expansion to include the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We leverage the fact that we now...