Scholar Spotlight: Leonardo Gentil Fernandes
“I study organizations that use violence to achieve political goals. I am primarily interested in how these groups, which are not governments, cooperate with each other and how they sometimes act like governments.”
Leonardo Gentil Fernandes
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
I use computational and statistical approaches to unearth generalizable patterns of behaviors among armed non-state actors. I am specifically interested in the emergence of these actors through patterns of individual and group cooperation. I also study how they engage in governance projects to achieve their broader political aims.
The growing use of computational social science approaches can work with historical and micro-level data to bring new insights to the discipline.
Why I Do What I Do
I first became interested in international relations after living in several countries (Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, and the US) and observing how organized violence played an important but unique role in each country’s politics, historically and currently. My interest in armed actors originated from this curiosity to understand all the places where I grew up.
Currently Working On
Recently published Rebel Governance in the Age of Climate Change
The book looks at how some rebel groups engage in environmental governance by providing public goods—like food safety, environmental conservation projects, and disaster relief—to achieve strategic goals and gain domestic and international legitimacy.
This book is one component of a larger project funded by a federal Minerva Research Initiative grant that looks at the link between conflict and the changing natural environment. Other components of this broader project include research on how citizens attribute blame for disaster response in Mozambique, the link between extraction and conservation by armed groups in Myanmar, and the impacts of conflict on deforestation around the world.
By Amy Beth Miller