Samuel Plapinger

Samuel Plapinger is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence (OCV) and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on insurgent organization and behavior, civil wars, and military strategy, operations, and effectiveness. Samuel’s dissertation develops a framework to measure and explain insurgent military effectiveness during civil wars and draws on extensive interviews with ex-combatants and archival research to analyze insurgent performance through case studies and statistical analysis. He has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Samuel’s research has been supported by the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, the Zeit Foundation’s Trajectories of Change Program, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS). He received an M.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 2014, and graduated with honors in Government and Economics from Wesleyan University in 2012.