On The Issues With Alon Ben-meir

My guest today is Nicholas Sambanis, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Identity & Conflict Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on conflict processes with a focus on civil wars and other forms of inter-group conflict. Published work in these research areas has appeared in several journals, including the American Political Science Review, International Organization, American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With Michael Doyle, he co-authored Making War and Building Peace (Princeton University Press, 2006), the first book to analyze the impact of United Nations peace operations in post-conflict transitions; with Paul Collier and other colleagues, he co-authored Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, one of the first quantitative studies of the causes of civil war around the world. In a two-volume book project, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, h