Nicholas Sambanis

Nicholas Sambanis is the Kalsi Family Professor of Political Science. He previously taught at Penn (2016-2023) and Yale (2001-2016), and he worked at the World Bank Development Economics Research Group (1999-2001). Sambanis is an expert on civil wars, ethnic conflict, and the politics of migration. His writing combines theories and methods from the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and political psychology to study processes of identity formation and change and the ways that identity politics shape conflict outcomes. He is the founder and faculty director of the Identity & Conflict Lab, a research group that studies both violent and non-violent inter-group conflict and one of the Yale MacMillan Center's global programs. His current writing is on how social identities shape individual behavior, how conflict affects identities, and on which interventions can help reduce intergroup conflict in its various guises, with particular focus on native-immigrant conflict.