Sarah Zukerman Daly, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Sarah Zukerman Daly joined the University of Notre Dame faculty in 2013 as Assistant Professor in Political Science after receiving her PhD in the subject from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her doctoral dissertation received the 2011 Lucian Pye Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Science from MIT. Her research interests lie in the fields of civil war, peace processes, international security, and ethnic politics with a regional focus on Latin America. Daly has served as a fellow in the Political Science Department and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, California, at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, New York, and at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, Massachusetts.

Nearly half of all countries emerging from civil conflict relapse into war within a few years of signing a peace agreement. The postwar trajectories of armed groups vary from organizational cohesion to dissolution, demilitarization to remilitarization. In Organized Violence after Civil War, Daly analyzes evidence from thirty-seven militia groups in Colombia, demonstrating that the primary driving force behind these changes is the variation in recruitment patterns within, and between, the warring groups. She documents the transition from war to peace through interviews with militia commanders, combatants and victims. Using rich ex-combatant survey data and geo-coded information on violence over fifty years of war, Daly explains the dynamics inside armed organizations and the strategic interactions among them. She also shows how the theory may be used beyond Colombia, both within the region of Latin America and across the rest of the world.