M. Christian Lehmann

• University of Brasília

Recent research shows that contemporary autocracies differ from their predecessors: Rather than deterring opposition through violent repression (Dictatorship of Fear), most autocrats today pretend to be democratic and rely on propaganda and co-optation of the educated elite (Informational Autocracy). How this new form of autocracy emerged is not fu...

Militias hamper state‐building by undermining the government's monopoly of violence, which creates an environment of anarchy. Yet many governments collaborate with them. These pro‐government militias (PGMs), such as paramilitary groups, are not only a poor‐country phenomenon, that is, economic growth does not seem to eradicate these armed nonstate...

Previous research finds a positive association between electoral fraud and post-election protests, violence, and civil conflict. This article contends that the effect of electoral fraud on peace can be heterogeneous. I investigate elections after civil wars that stalemated. My contribution is to present a theory and suggestive evidence that, in thi...

I investigate the effect of macroeconomic (output) volatility on anti‐refugee violence in developing countries. Opportunity cost, rapacity, and state capacity theories predict ambiguous effects. For causal inference I leverage output volatility caused by plausibly exogenous commodity price shocks. I find that adverse commodity price shocks increase...

Existing work seeks explanations for state repression mainly in domestic factors such as ethnic/religious cleavages, poverty and inequality, struggle for power, regime type and quality of state institutions, lack of loyalty, demand for scapegoats, and cultural or psychological traits of perpetrators. How foreign influences shape state repression ha...

The government of Uganda eliminated primary school fees during the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group notorious for abducting school aged boys and girls to turn them into rebels through indoctrination and intimidation. Previous research shows that the no-fee policy, commonly known as the Universal Primary Education (UPE)...

I add two novel features to the two‐player contest model, the workhorse model of civil war: civilians can flee (i.e., become refugees) and refugees receive aid. I find that aid to refugees can promote peace or fuel conflict, depending on the context.

Anti-refugee violence often accompanies refugee migration, but the factors that fuel or mitigate that violence remain poorly understood, including the common policy response in such settings of humanitarian aid. Existing theory and policy debates predict that aid to refugees exacerbates anti-refugee violence by increasing hosts’ resentment toward r...

I present evidence that U.S. aid for refugees mitigates civil conflict in their origin country. My main result is that a 10 percent increase in U.S. humanitarian aid for refugees reduces conflict deaths in their origin country by 1.5 percent. Presumably, aid for refugees entices civilians to flee from the location of conflict, thus depriving armed...

This article examines whether refugees are prime candidates for recruitment into armed groups and whether humanitarian aid to refugees impacts their choice to join armed groups. First, our original survey data of 1,358 Syrian households in Lebanon provide evidence that mobilization among the refugee population is low at baseline—the first empirical...

In metropolitan areas the Brazilian government provides drugs against hypertension and diabetes for free, and against other diseases 90 percent below market price. A city’s eligibility for these in-kind transfers changes exogenously at given city population thresholds. We compare vote shares of mayors around these thresholds. Regression discontinui...

We show that extremely poor, war-affected women in northern Uganda have high returns to a package of $150 cash, five days of business skills training, and ongoing supervision. Sixteen months after grants, participants doubled their microenterprise ownership and incomes, mainly from petty trading. We also show these ultrapoor have too little social...