He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2007 from the University of Maryland and has held fellowships at Stanford University and Oxford University. His research offers a new understanding of the politics of civil war onset, conceiving of large-scale political violence as a function of the strategies rulers choose to prevent coups from regime insiders. His research has been published in World Politics, American Journal of Political Science and other journals. His 2011 World Politics article, "The Enemy Within," won the Gregory Luebbert Award from the American Political Science Association for best paper in comparative politics for 2010 or 2011. In addition to his work on the coup-civil war nexus in Africa, he is a co-PI on a multi-year panel survey that examines the effects of state partition on identity, political attitudes and migration in Sudan.