Jason Hartwig

Jason Hartwig is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on conflict processes and state-building at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. His dissertation project, Combatants and Communities: Security Orders during Civil War, examines how violence between community groups is managed during civil wars through what he terms security orders. Within this work, Jason introduces a novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring territorial control and additionally theorizes how the salience of particular identities can mobilize communities to participate in violence. In other work, Jason examines the local effects of external intervention in Somalia and the relationship between conflict and successful military innovation. In his empirical work, Jason uses a mix of econometric and qualitative approaches and employs novel data on conflict from the U.S. Civil War, amongst others. Previously, Jason served as an armor officer in the U.S. Army and in civilian security sector reform positions with extensive fieldwork in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.