Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor of Government, Business, and Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (2021–present)
Professor (by courtesy), McCombs School of Business and LBJ School of Public Affairs
Co-Director, Innovations for Peace and Development (IPD)
Co-Founder and President, Evaluasi
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics (2025)
Strauss Center Distinguished Scholar · Member of EGAP
Ph.D., Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007
My research is organized around SCOPE: Security, Conflict, & Peace Evidence. It has four areas:
- Security: coercive and financial instruments. Sanctions, illicit-finance interdiction, beneficial-ownership transparency, terror financing, and counterinsurgency.
- Conflict: how political violence works. Civil war, terrorism, and armed-group behavior, and the forces that shape them, from aid shocks to natural resources.
- Peace: what holds after the fighting stops, and the development that makes peace last. Peacebuilding, ex-combatant reintegration, transitional governance, and aid in fragile and developing settings.
- Evidence: how far a finding travels. Generalizability and external validity, field experiments, pre-registration, research transparency, and research ethics.
I use field experiments, statistical and computational models, and extensive fieldwork across Colombia, DRC, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, the Bahamas, and elsewhere.
Publications appear in Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Penn Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Cambridge University Press, among others.
Where my research has taken me — personal fieldwork sites, country-focused study locations, and the places where Evaluasi has conducted impact evaluations. Click the map to open the interactive full-screen version.
Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
3.102 Batts, Austin, TX 78712
mgfindley@gmail.com