Sigrid Weber is a PhD Candidate focusing on internal displacement, local conflict dynamics, and territorial control in civil wars.
Her PhD research project, “Controlling a Moving World: Territorial Control, Displacement and the Spread of Civilian Targeting in Iraq”, analyzes how armed actors in civil wars respond to moving population groups within conflict zones and how this affects patterns of violence against civilians. She focuses particularly on violent dynamics during the Iraqi civil war against the Islamic State. Her research is supervised by C&C members Alexandra Hartman and Nils Metternich.
Sigrid theoretically argues that displacement alters local balances of control between territorial rulers and challengers and that rulers have incentives to govern violently if displaced persons from opposing loyalty groups move into their territories. Meanwhile, challengers spoil local governance by inflicting harm on civilians if incoming supporters of a local ruler reinforce the governor’s control.
To test these dynamics, she uses a combination of manual coding and machine learning to create a novel monthly dataset of territorial control, one-sided violence against moving populations and displacement patterns dis-aggregated by ethno-religious groups in the Iraqi civil war against the Islamic State (2014-2017).
Territorial Control in Iraq per year from Sigrid’s PhD research project using hand-coded and classified data
Sigrid has two co-authored publications, “Under the Roof of Rebels: Civilian Targeting after Territorial Takeover in Sierra Leone” in International Studies Quarterly and “Violence, Displacement, and Support for Internally Displaced Persons: Evidence from Syria” in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. She is also involved in two ongoing data collection efforts— one on property rights and return decisions of Yazidis in Iraq and the other on social cohesion amongst youth leaders in Myanmar.
Beyond her dissertation research, Sigrid examines when and how civilians make their choices to flee, how we can predict the resulting patterns of forced migration, and what impact these population movements have on conflict dynamics and post-conflict situations. She is also interested in refugee policies, statelessness, and civilian resilience in fragile settings. In addition to her academic research, she is also a consultant for the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement, supporting their data collections and their work with the Expert Group on Refugee and IDP statistics.