Sara Mitchell
University of Iowa, IA·Social Science
Earthquakes, floods and droughts are growing more frequent and could displace as many as one billion people by 2050. Existing studies disagree about when such environmental shocks lead to political violence.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
natural disasters
political violence
civil conflict
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Build and release a global dataset of government policy responses to natural disasters for all countries from 1900 to 2020.
- Test statistically whether restricting movement of disaster-affected populations, or restricting third-party aid efforts, increases the likelihood of political violence after disasters.
- Test whether unequal aid to politically favored regions, decentralized disaster management, and small pre-disaster remittance flows raise post-disaster conflict risk.
- Conduct twenty-four country case studies of disaster responses to trace how specific policy choices connect disasters to political violence.
More about the research
This project argues that much of the answer lies in what governments do after disaster strikes, and it sets out to measure those policy choices across more than a century of cases.
Why it matters
Poorly handled disaster responses may turn natural hazards into political violence. By identifying which government policies raise or lower that risk, the work could inform how affected states respond, how donors design aid, and how the U.S. government prepares to support disaster relief abroad, a sizable part of its foreign assistance. The new open dataset would also be reusable by other researchers and analysts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Timothy Peterson
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Social Science
Code all government-mandated restrictions on international flows of goods, services, technology, finance, travel, media and diplomacy from 1992–2022 into the GRIER dataset, with each prohibited interaction as a unit.
Erik Herron
West Virginia University, WV·Social Science
Measure how Hurricane Helene's damage to roads, power and communications affected North Carolina's capacity to run the 2024 election, using interviews with state and local election officials and records of polling place changes.
Todd Cherry
University of Wyoming, WY·Social Science
Measure how residents of zip codes with and without a severe 2024 wildfire perceive the risk reduction from past or planned hazardous-fuels forest thinning, using a survey experiment.
The school
University of Iowa: 32 labs on PI Pages, $703M a year on research, 418 research doctorates a year.
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