Eric Mvukiyehe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Duke University, and Faculty Affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Duke Center for International Development (DCID), and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS). His research agenda focuses on substate violence in its various forms, on political processes in fragile states and democratizing countries, and on the evaluation of policies designed to address violence and to promote democratic politics. His specific research interests are organized around four main strands: (i) employment and social stability; (ii) micro-foundations of peacekeeping and peacebuilding interventions; (iii) state capacity and local institutions; and (iv) gender and women’s empowerment. Empirically, Eric’s research uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods and has conducted several field experiments and extensive fieldwork across many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Central Asia regions.
Prior to joining Duke, Eric was an Economist at the World Bank’s Research Department (DEC/DIME), where he helped establish and led the Evidence for Peace (E4P) program—an innovative knowledge generation initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) whose goal was to provide an evidence-based guide to policy action through rigorous experimentation of large-scale policies and programs. He was also a Democracy Fellow with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where he developed rigorous impact evaluations of US Government programs in the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) sector, and consulted for the United Nations (UN) Secretariat, where he led evaluations of UN peacekeeping operations in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia using local population surveys.
Eric holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University (2014). He has taught, given talks, and written extensively about these research topics. His research has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Development Economics, the World Development, the World Politics, the BMJ Global Health, the British Journal of Political Science, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, the Comparative Political Studies, and the Tropical Medicine and International Health, among other outlets.