Shapiro awarded $8.4 million by Department of Defense

Correction appended

University faculty and students will soon have the opportunity to join an investigation into the effects of foreign economic aid on political violence, thanks to an $8.4 million grant awarded to Wilson School professor Jacob Shapiro by the Department of Defense.

Shapiro received the grant in December as part of the Minerva Research Initiative, which funds university-based social science research into “areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy,” according to the initiative’s website. Shapiro said he hopes to enable aid from organizations like the United Nations to be used more efficiently, as his research will focus on determining how to make better use of sparse aid resources.

Shapiro’s project is comprised of three parts: gathering detailed and comprehensive data on ongoing historical conflicts, performing field research in various regions of political violence and generating quasi-randomized data on the effects of aid on the degree of political violence in these regions. The team will consist of researchers from Stanford, UC San Diego, the United States Agency for International Development and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development.

After serving in the U.S. Navy and Naval Reserve for more than seven years, Shapiro said he wanted to come up with a different way to alleviate the problems he witnessed, he said. “In many ways, I thought I could have a bigger impact looking at big picture issues than doing stuff on the ground,” he explained. “The big challenge for the next 15 to 20 years is, ‘How do we reduce violence that happens around politics?’ ”

Shapiro said he started working on the problem in the middle of June 2008. “I was talking with some colleagues about what’s really a big question, that’s important, that we think we could answer if we had more than the usual resources,” he said. Shapiro submitted his project proposal at the end of September and received word of the award Dec. 23.

To get funding from the initiative, researchers must submit a proposal along with letters of support from various agencies that agree to work with the research team if it receives funding, Shapiro explained. The proposal is then reviewed by evaluation panels of “academically qualified experts in the relevant academic fields,” according to the initiative’s website. The panels select proposals to fund, basing their recommendations on intellectual merit, technical capability and probability of success, Shapiro said.

Shapiro noted that he has not yet finalized the list of regions in which to conduct field research, but added that he plans to analyze data from Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and Vietnam, where there exist “tremendous amounts of data” that need to be organized.

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The grant proposal’s initial budget plan splits the money evenly among the three project components. Since the problems at hand are complex, Shapiro said, results may be slow in materializing. As a result, some work done at the outset of the project “will only pay dividends three to four years out,” he explained. “The thing about this grant, the way it was set up intentionally, it lets us think long-term,” he added.

Shapiro said he is already organizing the research team. While seeking mostly postdoctoral scholars, he said he wants to support graduate student research and get undergraduates involved. “We’re hoping to use this [grant] to get a larger community to work on these issues,” he said.

Shapiro added that the Princeton component of the project will be based in the security studies center that will be announced in April as a new part of the Wilson School.

Correction

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An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Jacob Shapiro served in the U.S. Army Reserves for more than seven years. In fact, he served in the U.S. Navy and Naval Reserve.