Carlos III - Juan March Institute
Department of Social Sciences
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
francisco.villamil@uc3m.es
I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Carlos III University in Madrid and a research fellow at the Carlos III - Juan March Institute. I obtained my PhD from ETH Zurich in 2020, where I was part of the International Conflict Research group.
My research focuses on the causes and consequences of armed conflict and political violence. In particular, my work explores how political violence generates processes that shape the future trajectory of conflicts, particularly through the effect of violence on civilian preferences. More broadly, I’m interested in the endogenous social dynamics that are part of political conflicts. I mainly use quantitative and computational methods, and rely on a variety of data sources and data collection strategies, including digitization of historical archives, web scraping, and geospatial data. My book project investigates the long-term consequences of political violence and develops a new theory on how the legacies of violence on individuals’ preferences are conditioned by the local social context. The book project is based on my dissertation, which was awarded CEPC’s Juan Linz Prize. Part of my research has been published or conditionally accepted at The Journal of Politics, the Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, among others.
In the Data & Code section I share different resources I have developed for my own work in order to facilitate future empirical research, particularly for historical analyses of Spain.