Fotini Christia | People

Fotini Christia
Fotini
Christia
Professor of Political Science
E53-417
617-324-5595

Biography

Fotini Christia joined the MIT faculty in 2008 upon graduating with a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. She was an Andrew Carnegie inaugural fellow and a Harvard Academy fellow. Christia has done extensive experimental, survey and ethnographic fieldwork on conflict, identity, and development in divided societies in the Muslim world. She is presently working on projects around computation and conflict on sectarianism in Iraq, refugee return in Syria and violence and displacement in Yemen. Fotini is the author of Alliance Formation in Civil War, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, which received the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations and the Distinguished Book Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association. Her articles have been published in Science, the Review of Economic Studies, American Political Science Review, Journal of Development Economics, and Annual Review of Political Science, among other journals. Her opinion pieces have appeared in venues such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and The Washington Post. For her research, Fotini has received support from the World Bank, USAID,  the UN’s World Food Program and the World Bank, among other funders. She graduated magna cum laude with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research from Columbia College and a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Website

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[Teaching]

Publications|Selected Publications

Fotini Christia, "Empowering women facing gender-based violence amid COVID-19 through media campaigns," Nature Human Behavior, August 7, 2023

Fotini Christia, “Mitigating the impact of biased artificial intelligence in emergency decision-making,” Communications Medicine Vol. 2 (2022) (With Hammaad Adam, Aparna Balagopalan, Emily Alsentzer, and Marzyeh Ghassemi)

Fotini Christia, “Evidence on the nature of sectarian animosity from a geographically representative survey of Iraqi and Iranian Shia pilgrims,” Nature Human Behaviour Vol. 6, No. 9 (2022) (With Elizabeh Dekeyser and Dean Knox)

Fotini Christia, "Community Policing Is Not One Size Fits All," Foreign Policy, November 29, 2021. (With Graeme Blair & Jeremy M. Weinstein)

Fotini Christia, "Training the Covid-19 Cohort," Social Science Research Council, July 30, 2020. (With Chappell Lawson)

Fotini Christia, “Navigating Data Collection in War Zones,” in Peter Krause and Ora Szekely, eds., An Unorthodox Guide to Fieldwork (Columbia University Press 2020)

Fotini Christia, “Assessing Syrian Refugee Integration Using Call Detail Records from Turkey ,” in Albert Ali Salah, Alex Pentland, Bruno Lepri, and Emmanuel Letouze, eds., Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios (Springer 2019) (With Tugba Bozcaga, Constantinos Daskalakis, Elizabeth Harwood, and Christos Papadimitriou)

Fotini Christia, “Tehran Paints Over its Anti-American Murals,” Foreign Policy, November 11, 2019

Fotini Christia, “Even Conservative Iranians Want Closer Ties to the United States,” Foreign Policy, May 23, 2019 (with Elizabeth Dekeyser and Dean Knox)

Fotini Christia, “The Geography of Gulenism in Turkey,” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2019 (with Tugba Bozcaga)

Fotini Christia, “Decentralization in Post-Conflict Settings: Assessing Community-Driven Development in the Wake of Violence,” in Jonathan Rodden and Erik Wibbels, eds., Decentralized Governance and Accountability: Academic Research and the Future of Donor Programming (New York: Cambridge University Press) (February 2019).

Fotini Christia, “State Capacity Redux: Integrating Classical and Experimental Contributions to an Enduring Debate,” Annual Review of Political Science (ARPS) Vol.21 (2018) (with Elissa Berwick)

Fotini Christia, “Direct democracy and resource allocation: Experimental evidence from Afghanistan,” Journal of Development Economics (JDE) Vol. 124 (January 2017) (with Andrew Beath and Ruben Enikolopov)

For a complete list of publications

[Books]

Media

Fotini Christia was an invited commentator in Foreign AffairsAsk the Experts: Is Washington Right to Leave Afghanistan?” June 22, 2021.

"3 Questions: Artificial intelligence for health care equity," MIT News, March 23, 2021. (With Regina Barzilay and Collin Stultz.)

Podcast: "AI, data science and society with Constantinos Daskalakis & Fotini Christia," Hellenic Innovation Network, March 12, 2021.

"3 questions with Fotini Christia, the new chair of the Social & Engineering Systems PhD program," IDSS, October 23, 2020.

"Fotini Christia named director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center," MIT News, October 14, 2020.

[News]