About

Fotini Christia is a faculty member at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Law
• Social Science
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Criminology
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Applied psychology
• Psychiatry
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Imams and Patrons: Service Provision by Islamist Non-State Actors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Can Development Programs Counter Insurgencies? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

  DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2025-07-01

  other

  We exploit a randomized controlled trial conducted between 2007 and 2011 to identify the effect of Afghanistan's largest local governance and development program on the strength of the insurgency. We find that the program reduced violence, improved economic outcomes, and increased government support in interior regions of the country, but increased violence in villages close to the Pakistani border, where foreign insurgents were more numerous. The results suggest that development programs can be effective in suppressing locally driven insurgencies, but may be counterproductive where insurgents are not reliant on the local population for support. (JEL C93, D74, F35, O15, O17, O18)

  Publisher

• Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records

  British Journal of Political Science · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Drone strikes are a fixture of US counter-terrorism policy, often advertised as ‘surgical’ alternatives to ground operations. Drone strikes’ effects, however, are less precise than proponents suggest. Using data from over 12 billion call detail records from Yemen between 2010 and 2012, we show that the US drone campaign significantly disrupted civilian lives in previously-unmeasured ways. Strikes cause large increases in civilian mobility away from affected areas and create immediate, durable displacement: mobility among nearby individuals increases 24 percent on strike days, and average distance from the strike region increases steadily for over a month afterward, signifying prolonged displacement for thousands of individuals. Strikes are disruptive regardless of whether they kill civilians, though effects are larger after civilian casualties. Our findings suggest that even carefully targeted drone campaigns generate collateral disruption that has not been weighed in public debate or policy decisions about the costs and benefits of drone warfare.

  PublisherDOI

• Report to the President for year ended June 30, 2025, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

  2025-06-30

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This report contains the following sections: Faculty & Leadership, Academic Programs, Research, Events, External Relations, Resource Development and Fundraising, and IDSSx.

  PublisherOA PDF

• A Generalized Framework for Assessing Cargo Loss Impacts of Alternative Maritime Fuels

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Can Development Programs Counter Insurgencies? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan^†

  American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2025-06-26

  article

  We exploit a randomized controlled trial conducted between 2007 and 2011 to identify the effect of Afghanistan's largest local governance and development program on the strength of the insurgency. We find that the program reduced violence, improved economic outcomes, and increased government support in interior regions of the country, but increased violence in villages close to the Pakistani border, where foreign insurgents were more numerous. The results suggest that development programs can be effective in suppressing locally driven insurgencies, but may be counterproductive where insurgents are not reliant on the local population for support. (JEL C93, D74, F35, O15, O17, O18)

  PublisherDOI

• Imams and Patrons: Service Provision by Islamist Non-State Actors

  Journal of Conflict Resolution · 2025-09-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Whether armed or unarmed, Islamist non-state actors have a reputation for winning over citizens’ support and spreading their ideas through service delivery, reflecting a worldwide trend in non-state service provision. While existing research attributes the notable variation in service provision to strategic targeting, we argue that service allocation is also highly dependent on a non-state actor’s ability to marshal resources through local economic elites. Our findings demonstrate that service provision by religious non-state actors is more likely in areas and periods where there is associational involvement among elite supporters at the local level. For our inferences, we examine the spatial and temporal variation in the service delivery of a major Islamist group in Turkey. We use original data on non-state service infrastructure, local business associations, charitable endowments, and economic development, as proxied by average nightlight density, along with data on public service infrastructure and historical state-building institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-12-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• A Causal Framework to Evaluate Racial Bias in Law Enforcement Systems

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-02-22 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  We are interested in developing a data-driven method to evaluate race-induced biases in law enforcement systems. While the recent works have addressed this question in the context of police-civilian interactions using police stop data, they have two key limitations. First, bias can only be properly quantified if true criminality is accounted for in addition to race, but it is absent in prior works. Second, law enforcement systems are multi-stage and hence it is important to isolate the true source of bias within the "causal chain of interactions" rather than simply focusing on the end outcome; this can help guide reforms. In this work, we address these challenges by presenting a multi-stage causal framework incorporating criminality. We provide a theoretical characterization and an associated data-driven method to evaluate (a) the presence of any form of racial bias, and (b) if so, the primary source of such a bias in terms of race and criminality. Our framework identifies three canonical scenarios with distinct characteristics: in settings like (1) airport security, the primary source of observed bias against a race is likely to be bias in law enforcement against innocents of that race; (2) AI-empowered policing, the primary source of observed bias against a race is likely to be bias in law enforcement against criminals of that race; and (3) police-civilian interaction, the primary source of observed bias against a race could be bias in law enforcement against that race or bias from the general public in reporting against the other race. Through an extensive empirical study using police-civilian interaction data and 911 call data, we find an instance of such a counter-intuitive phenomenon: in New Orleans, the observed bias is against the majority race and the likely reason for it is the over-reporting (via 911 calls) of incidents involving the minority race by the general public.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Meta-analysis of the Effects of Community Policing

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-12-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Рубен Ениколопов

  73 shared

• Andrew Beath

  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

  45 shared

• Sean Kelly

  36 shared

• Daniel Kirsch

  Boston University

  36 shared

• Sergei Kostiaev

  36 shared

• Carsten T. Vala

  Loyola University Maryland

  36 shared

• David Fott

  University of Nevada, Las Vegas

  36 shared

• Christopher Alcantara

  Western University

  36 shared