Research
My research asks how state policy produces violence in Latin America, focusing on violence as a strategic response by criminal organizations to economic and security policy. I find that state action reshapes violence more often than it reduces it: infrastructure investment carries a logistical violence premium, raising homicide in the short run, while removing criminal leadership changes the form violence takes rather than its level. I work primarily in Brazil, combining causal inference on municipal panel data with field research. Additionally, I am currently working on testing these findings outward as Brazilian criminal organizations expand across the South Atlantic.
Current projects
The logistical violence premium. The logistical violence premium. “Paving the Way for Violence” (revise-and-resubmit, Latin American Politics and Society) shows that road construction in Ceará between 2006 and 2016 produced a short-run increase in homicides once new routes were completed. The paper draws on a staggered difference-in-differences design across 184 municipalities in Ceará and eleven months of fieldwork. It is the first step in a broader agenda asking what happens when the state’s infrastructural reach expands faster than its capacity to govern what that reach creates.
Kingpin decapitation and criminal governance. “When the King Falls, Does the Throne Bleed?” (Presented at EPSS 2026) An ongoing project building a dataset and estimation pipeline comparing the governance structures of the PCC (São Paulo) and the Comando Vermelho (Rio de Janeiro), examining how the removal of criminal leadership affects post-removal violence outcomes. The paper measures the effects of removal based on manner (kill or arrest) and based on violence visibility (visible or invisible).
Book project: State Authority at the Infrastructure Frontier. A prospective book extending the dissertation’s core finding. The project will analyze how the investment in road infrastructure has impacted Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. The project will test what elements of state capacity (absent or present) dictate the response of criminal actors. The book will contribute to a broader understanding of the connection between development and security as joint products of state action.
Framing-stage project: organized crime in Lusophone Africa. Early-stage work extending my approach to criminal governance and state capacity to Mozambique and other Lusophone African contexts.
Methods
Mixed methods, including: fieldwork, archival work, panel data regression, spatial econometrics, and causal inference — including modern staggered difference-in-differences estimators (Callaway–Sant’Anna, Sun–Abraham, LP-DiD).