Maxine Leis successfully defends thesis
On 9 January, the DPCR research community had the great joy of hearing Maxine Leis´ impressive defence of her dissertation ‘Signals of Violence, Patterns of Flight: Predicting and Explaining Conflict-Related Mobility’.
The Departments thanks Professor Julian Wucherpfennig from the Hertie School in Berlin, who served as opponent as well as Maxine’s supervisors Professor Håvard Hegre and Professor Nina von Uexkull. We would also like to thank the grading committee consisting of Professor Joakim Palme, Associate Professor Sophia Hatz and Associate Professor Steven Miller from Stockholm University.
Maxine’s dissertation examines mobility resulting from different forms of violence and natural hazards. A core objective of the research is to improve the forecasting and estimation of conflict-related mobility by deepening our understanding of how these shocks shape population movements. The project is part of the Mistra Geopolitics Research School.
The dissertation includes four essays:
Essay I: Shows that detailed features of political violence (how it escalates, where it occurs, and who is involved) improve one-year-ahead predictions of refugee and asylum seeker outflows.
Essay II: Demonstrates anticipatory mobility in Somalia, showing that civilians move in response to nearby violence risk, not only violence in their own district.
Essay III: Estimates the longer-term migration impacts of organised violence, finding that state-based conflict is associated with approximately 2.2 million net migration differences across Africa and the Middle East (2015–2020).
Essay IV: Examines household mobility in Bangladesh, showing how political violence and natural hazards jointly shape mobility and immobility depending on household resources. This paper is available as a pre-print in Nature Communications Earth & Environment: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-03086-3
🔗 The extensive summary (Kappa) is available here: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2015340&dswid=-4117