Nicholas Sambanis

Nicholas Sambanis is a Kalsi Family Professor of Political Science at Yale University, a former Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Identity & Conflict Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on inter-group conflict, ranging from everyday forms of discrimination to violent protests and civil wars. He co-authored Making War and Building Peace, the first quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of United Nations peacekeeping operations after the Civil War, and Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. This book launched an extensive research agenda on the economics of political violence. He also collaborated on the first multi-country mixed-method (“nested”) research project exploring the causes of civil war in a two-volume book, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis.

The Penn Identity & Conflict Lab he cofounded is an interdisciplinary initiative addressing a wide range of topics related to intergroup conflict. Research areas include the effects of external intervention on peace-building after ethnic war, the analysis of violent escalation of separatist movements, the conflict between native and immigrant populations, strategies to mitigate bias and discrimination against minority groups, and the impact of peer groups on the formation of policy preferences. Sambanis previously taught at Yale University. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.