Topher L. McDougal

I am a development economist and professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, California, where I direct graduate programs in Humanitarian Action and Peace & Justice. My research interests include the economics of peace and conflict, illicit markets (especially for firearms), and human predation of environmental systems. In addition to consulting for various organizations including the World Bank, Mercy Corps, and the International Rescue Committee, I have been a research affiliate at the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Graduate Institute for International & Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland), a principal of the Small Arms Data Observatory (SADO), and an invited scholar-in-residence at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Tecnológico de Monterrey. My first book, The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict: Predation, Production, and Peripheries (Oxford, 2017), explained how trade networks shape the nature and extent of civil war violence. I received a PhD and MCP from MIT, and a BA from Swarthmore College.