Her research interests deal with issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world. She has done extensive ethnographic, survey, and experimental research on the effects of development aid in postconflict, multiethnic societies, with a focus on Afghanistan and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is the author of Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, awarded the 2013 Gregory M. Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics. Her research has also been published in Science and in the American Political Science Review, and she has written opinion pieces for Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. She received a PhD in public policy from Harvard University. She served as an Asia-Pacific analyst for Freedom in the World.