Narmin Yousef-Butt
Book Project:
My book, Marking the Marked: Elites, Collaborators, and the Politics of Exclusion, which is based on my dissertation, recipient of the Best Fieldwork Award of the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Section and an honorable mention for the APSA-MENA Best Dissertation Award, examines how wartime affiliations shape the trajectory of post-conflict recovery. I ask why elected politicians in post-conflict states exclude populations marked as collaborators when every institutional signal points toward inclusion. My answer is that exclusion is not a failure of the post-conflict order but a strategy for building it: in fragile governing coalitions, the collaborator label unifies allies, narrows claims on scarce state resources, and broadcasts an enforceable boundary.
The book proceeds in three parts. The first develops a grounded theory of collaboration as a fluid and politically contested category, asking who counts as a collaborator, who decides, and on what evidence. Drawing on roughly 475 interviews with politicians and voters and six conjoint experiments with Iraqi elected officials, I show that the label rests not on verified conduct but on socially constructed cues such as kinship, identity, duration of residence under occupation, and rumor, which politicians weight as heavily as formal security reviews. The second part investigates how these judgments shape three domains of postwar governance: constituent responsiveness, tested through a nationwide audit of sitting provincial councilors; the distribution of reconstruction, tested through observational data on 741 neighborhoods and an allocation experiment; and elite cooperation, tested through a lab-in-the-field experiment with 600 politicians. Marked constituents are less likely to receive replies, marked neighborhoods are rebuilt at roughly half the rate of comparable ones, and marked colleagues are shut out of cooperation. The third part explains why the exclusion endures: two survey experiments demonstrate that voters and fellow politicians alike reward those who enforce the boundary and stigmatize those who cross it, making exclusion self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. Together, these findings show why some individuals and communities remain marginalized long after the violence has ended, and why post-conflict rebuilding so often reproduces the wartime cleavages it was meant to overcome.
Working Papers
“Voting for Collaborators: Evidence from Afghanistan.” Under Review.
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.
Job Market Paper: “Selective Reconstruction: Political Elites, Collaborators, and Public Goods in Post-Conflict Iraq.” (with R. Aldulaimi). Under Review.
Honorable Mention for the APSA-MENA Best Paper Award
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). Revise and Resubmit at The Journal of Politics.
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