Research

Dissertation and Book Project

• ▸ Promises and Perils: Women's Empowerment After Revolution
  My dissertation and book project addresses a question that has been overlooked in both revolution and gender scholarship: why do revolutionary regimes diverge so sharply in their treatment of women’s rights? While 20th-century social revolutions all claimed to remake the political and social order, some produced sweeping gender reforms while others retrenched or remained silent. Existing theories emphasize modernization, ideology, or women’s presence in institutional junctures, but none explain this wide variation. My project offers a new answer: the distinctive role of anticolonial mobilization in shaping revolutionary agendas. Anticolonial social revolutions---those that simultaneously dismantle colonial domination and entrenched class hierarchies---are especially likely to produce durable gains for women. By reframing women’s subordination as a product of colonial domination, anticolonial social revolutions linked women’s liberation to national sovereignty, mobilized broader support, fostered solidarities and ideological commitments that disrupted colonial legacies, expanded claims to equality, and embedded gender reforms into state institutions through single-party governance and mass organizations. Methodologically, this project combines large-N causal inference, comparative historical analysis, computational text analysis, and extensive archival and interview evidence from over six months of in-depth fieldwork in Cuba. Cross-national statistical analysis reveals that anticolonial social revolutions yielded the largest and most durable gains in women’s political empowerment compared to other revolutionary types, and were uniquely likely to maintain elite cohesion through single-party governance. Importantly, while revolutions that were both social and anticolonial evolved into single-party regimes, neither socialism nor anticolonialism alone proves sufficient to generate significant gains for women. To probe mechanisms, I compare the 1959 Cuban Revolution with Mexico’s failed socialist revolution (1917).

Under Review

• ▸ Enforcing Rights: How Specialized Services Protect Women in Weak Institutional Environments
  When do state interventions make legal rights enforceable in weak institutional environments? States have implemented diverse strategies to address gender-based violence, which affects at least one-third of women worldwide. While studies of justice system interventions have yielded mixed results, the impact of health-based programs remains less understood. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, I argue that the primary mechanism through which health-based interventions exert their impact is enforcement signaling: clinics coordinate inter-institutional responses that convey credible enforcement efforts. I evaluate the Guatemalan government's network of specialized sexual violence clinics designed to jointly activate a medical and judicial response. Using original panel data on crimes and prosecutions and a difference-in-differences design that exploits temporal and spatial variation in clinic rollout, I find that access to clinics significantly reduces sexual violence and increases crime prosecution. Descriptive evidence of reduced social tolerance of gender-based violence, particularly among women, suggests that clinics may also shift community attitudes and empower victims and survivors. The study advances comparative debates on state capacity and enforcement, showing how rights-based service delivery can reconfigure the politics of protection in low-capacity states. Contact for working paper.

Working Papers

• ▸ Women After Revolution
  Why do some revolutions advance women’s empowerment while others do not? Scholars agree that conflict can open windows of opportunity for gender equality, yet how different types of revolution shape these outcomes remains unexplored. I argue that revolutions durably empower women when they fuse women's emancipation with national sovereignty extit{and} institutionalize mass women's organizations as state-building tools. The first makes rolling back women's gains a betrayal of the new nation; the second gives women a standing channel to press their demands from below. Triangulating across six months of fieldwork, original archival, survey, and administrative data, and over 90 interviews with revolutionaries in Cuba, I document how women's organizations leveraged an inclusive national liberation ideology to extract ministerial concessions, shape family law, and normalize women's leadership at the local level. I then set Cuba against a global panel of 345 revolutionary episodes since 1900, using a staggered-adoption difference-in-differences design. National-liberation social revolutions produce the largest gains in women's empowerment---an average treatment effect more than five times that of revolutions that were neither anticolonial nor social. The findings underscore how broad-based mobilization from below can generate gains for marginalized groups, even within authoritarian regimes. Contact for working paper.
• ▸ Marching for Change: Quantifying the Effects of Women’s Rights Protests on Legislation and Femicide in Latin America (with Lily Medina Jara)
  Do protests against violence toward women help reduce it, or do they exacerbate it? Over the past 20 years, mass demonstrations with feminist causes have dramatically increased across the region. These movements have advocated for critical legislative changes, including the legalization of abortion and the recognition of femicide as a distinct criminal offense. But how effective are these protests? We analyze their impact both on legislation and on (actual) violence against women. Using an instrumental variable, we provide the first cross-country evaluation of the effects of protest agenda-seeding on femicide and whether these protests directly influence legislation criminalizing violence against women. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on gendered social movements and policy change, offering insights into how grassroots activism can influence both legal frameworks and societal behavior. Contact for working paper.
• ▸ Rights Talk: Activists and Governments at the UN Human Rights Council (with Leonardo Arriola and Fiona Shen-Bayh)
  Do activists from countries governed by authoritarian regimes alter how they communicate with the international community? We examine how domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating under authoritarian regimes strategically adapt their use of language regarding the types of rights-based claims they raise. To assess this expectation, we draw on activist statements made through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) instituted by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). For every UPR cycle, the UNHRC receives thousands of document submissions from activists worldwide. Through text-analysis and topic modeling of over 500 documents submitted between 2008 and 2021, we provide empirical evidence of the distinct use of language employed by domestic NGOs based in authoritarian regimes. We further show that the UNHRC itself is more likely to selectively engage with issues raised by such NGOs. Contact for working paper.
• ▸ Between Access and Advocacy: Rights Activism in Post-Conflict Côte d’Ivoire (with Leonardo Arriola, Arsène Brice Bado, and Justine Davis)
  This article examines how rights activists in Côte d’Ivoire have recalibrated their strategies following the country’s transition from civil war to a more constrained political environment marked by shifting state-civil society relations and declining international support. Drawing on 100 semi-structured interviews with leaders of human rights and community-based organizations across the country, the study analyzes how activists interpret political risks and adjust their practices accordingly. Interviewees consistently describe constraints operating less through overt repression than through indirect administrative practices, heightened political sensitivities during electoral periods, and selective state responsiveness. Activists report that maintaining access to communities and authorities requires careful management of political perception, leading many groups to emphasize neutrality and avoid public confrontation. Leaders note the need to tailor advocacy language to different audiences -- using technical, evidence-based framing with authorities and conflict-sensitive communication with communities -- in order to prevent their work from being interpreted as partisan. While these adaptations help sustain organizational presence, interviewees also emphasize their costs: legal recognition barriers and uneven state engagement often limit their capacity to publicly denounce abuses or mobilize collective action. By centering activists’ own accounts, the article shows how depoliticization, mission diversification, and communicative flexibility function as practical responses to politically uncertain environments. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on how rights activism is reshaped under contested civic space in Africa. Contact for working paper.
• ▸ The Gendered Process of Migration: Labor-Market Behavior of Left-Behind Wives in Mexico
  This paper explores the effect of male emigration from Mexico on women's labor-market behavior. It borrows from existing gender, labour-market, and migration literature to point to the unintended negative effects of economic dependence on migrants. It uses nonlongitudinal data extracted via an ethnosurvey approach by the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). The results show that Mexican women's labor-market behavior may face normative constraints that limit their ability to undertake paid work. This is exacerbated by living in a household where the main provider is a migrant and whose absence results in an increased burden of unpaid domestic labor on his non-migrant spouse. This study contributes to a growing line of research suggesting that women's economic choices in developing countries can be shaped by gender norms rather than by economic or institutional characteristics alone. Contact for working paper.

Work in Progress

• ▸ The Paradox of Protection: Gender-based Violence and Claim-making Under Criminal Rule (with Isabella Caro Montini)
  This project assesses the impact of specialized judicial institutions on women's claim-making behavior across two major metropolitan areas in Latin America: the states of Mexico and São Paulo, both marked by strong criminal group presence and uneven state provision. Using a survey experiment informed by extensive fieldwork, the research examines how women in these settings choose to report gendered crimes, whether to formal authorities (e.g., police), criminal organizations, or non-governmental organizations, in municipalities with varying levels of state presence and judicial specialization. Contact for working paper.
• ▸ When Men Leave: Labor Migration and the Political Rise of Women in Mexico (with Stephanie Zonszein and Antonella Bandiera)
• ▸ Contesting Citizenship from Within: Gender, Inclusion, and Indigenous Governance in Mexico (with Elena Barham and Edgar Franco-Vivanco)
• ▸ Stability or Liberty? Malian Attitudes Toward Rights Restrictions Under Prolonged Transition (with Leonardo Arriola, Jaimie Bleck, Moumouni Soumano, and Bruce Whitehouse)