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Narmin Yousef-Butt
Book Project:
My book project, Rebuilding After Conflict: Origins and Legacies of Collaboration, examines how wartime affiliations shape the trajectory of post-conflict recovery. The first part of the book develops a grounded theory of collaboration as a fluid and politically contested category, asking who is considered a collaborator, who decides, and how those judgments vary across actors and settings. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with civilians and elites in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as eight large-scale conjoint experiments in Iraq, I show that label of collaboration is not always based on verified evidence but instead rely on socially constructed cues such as ethnicity, kinship, or rumor, with profound consequences for reintegration. The second part of the book investigates how these judgments shape key domains of postwar governance—electoral preferences, public goods distribution, and elite cooperation—using survey experiments, observational data, interviews, and a lab-in-the-field experiment. I find that the label of “collaborator” generates persistent patterns of exclusion: voters penalize candidates with collaboration histories, politicians avoid allocating resources to neighborhoods associated with collaborators, and elites hesitate to cooperate with peers carrying this stigma. Together, these findings demonstrate that the moral and political judgments surrounding collaboration are central to understanding why some individuals and communities remain marginalized long after the violence has ended, and why efforts at post-conflict rebuilding often reproduce wartime cleavages instead of overcoming them.
Working Papers
“Voting for Collaborators: Evidence from Afghanistan.”
Revise and Resubmit at AJPS.
Are voters in multi-ethnic post-authoritarian democracies willing to support candidates who collaborated with the former regime, and how do shared identity concerns shape this? I examine these dynamics using a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Kabul, Afghanistan, prior to the collapse of Afghan democracy. I find that collaboration reduces the reported willingness to vote, while shared ethnic identity increases support for candidates, and the interaction between the two reveals a moderating effect of co-ethnic identity on the negative effects of collaboration. Yet, these moderating effects run in opposing directions for `victimized' versus `perpetrator' group members. For `victimized' group members, a mechanism of in-group favoritism seems to be at work such that co-ethnic enemy collaboration is perceived as coerced; for `perpetrator' group members, a mechanism of in-group policing appears to be at play where co-ethnics are seen as having engaged voluntarily and, therefore punished.
“Selective Reconstruction: Political Elites, Collaborators, and Public Goods in Post-Conflict Iraq.”
(with R. Aldulaimi). Under Review.
Will post-conflict societies include individuals who collaborated with the losing side of a civil conflict in reconstruction efforts? Existing scholarship emphasizes that national governments often pursue inclusive reconstruction to promote stability and satisfy international and domestic audiences. We argue, however, that patterns of inclusion change when authority over reconstruction rests with local politicians. National governments face broad audiences and have incentives to include these individuals. Local politicians, however, have narrower audiences and view these individuals as electorally costly, leading them to exclude them from rebuilding efforts. We evaluate this in Iraq using observational data from 741 neighborhoods, a conjoint experiment with 398 local politicians, and interviews with 50 local politicians. We find that local politicians avoid investing in neighborhoods with high densities of collaborators due to perceived electoral costs. Our findings show that post-conflict reconstruction depends not only on national commitments to inclusion but also on local politicians.
“Political Cooperation in Post-Conflict Societies: The Impact of Collaboration Histories Among Political Elites” - (with R. Aldulaimi). Under Review.
How does a politician's willingness to cooperate change when their peer has a history of collaboration with the losing side in a conflict? What mechanisms drive this reluctance? Which politicians are most sensitive to collaboration history, and under what conditions might this stigma be mitigated? We address these questions using a multi-method research design in Iraq, combining a lab-in-the-field experiment and qualitative interviews, both conducted with elected politicians. We find that collaboration history reduces cooperation, primarily due to concerns about trust and fears of future disloyalty. However, this exclusion is not uniform. Politicians who rely on the votes of former collaborators or have personal or social ties to them are more likely to cooperate, while those who experienced wartime harm are especially punitive. Importantly, we show that disclosing prior cooperative behavior partially offsets the stigma of collaboration. These findings highlight both the challenges and possibilities for fostering political reintegration in post-conflict societies.
Fieldwork in Progress
Research on Collaborators, Stigma, and the Politics of Reintegration (Syria and Libya):
“Trust, Legitimacy, and the Reintegration of Former Collaborators”. Fieldwork Ongoing.
“Elite Signaling and Collaborator Reintegration in Libya and Syria”. Fieldwork Ongoing.
Research on Exclusion (Syria and Iraq):
"Neighborhood Inequality and Electoral Behavior: How Exclusion Shapes Local Election in Iraq." (with M. Abuzaid). Fieldwork Ongoing.
"Economic Exclusion and the Dynamics of Violence." (with M. Abuzaid). Fieldwork Ongoing.
"From Margins to Movement: The Political Economy of Exclusion and its Influence on Nieghborhood Mobilization in Iraq." (with M. Abuzaid). Fieldwork Ongoing.
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