I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Government at Harvard University, and a 2024-2025 Minerva/Peace Scholar, jointly supported by the United States Institute of Peace and the Minerva Research Initiative at the US Department of Defense. At Harvard, I am an affiliate to the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, as well as a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Prize Fellow.
My research focuses on how combatants build states and how informal wartime institutions shape divergent trajectories of stability and development. In my dissertation, I analyze large-N datasets, such as the universe of all call detail records generated by a major telecommunications company, to understand the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan after their victory in 2021.
Contact
mballesteros@g.harvard.edu
1737 Cambridge Street
Subfields
Comparative Politics | International Relations | Methods and Formal Theory
Academic Interests
Data Science and Political Methodology | Political Economy & Development | Political Geography | Security Studies
Research Methods
Quantitative Methods
Geographic Regions of Study
Asia | Latin America