Prakhar Sharma

Political Science / Ph.D. Candidate

Biography

 

Prakhar Sharma is a PhD Candidate in political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He manages the Political Violence FieldLab at Yale University http://www.thefieldlaboratory.org/.  

Prakhar studies civil wars from a comparative perspective. His dissertation focuses on explaining the heterogeneity of preferences among civilians regarding service provision in a civil war context, with Afghanistan serving as a principal case.

Prakhar has consulted with the World Bank and the UNICEF on public service provision in Afghanistan. He has also worked with academic institutions such as Yale University and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (Singapore) on understanding micro-level patterns of violence in civil wars. Prakhar has managed several large-scale impact evaluations and randomized controlled experiments to study inter-ethnic cooperation in civil wars; blame attribution dynamics; and the relationship between vocational training and support for insurgency in Afghanistan. He was a visiting fellow at the United Nations University in Tokyo (2006) and at the Stimson Center in Washington DC (2009). In addition to his doctoral training in political science, Prakhar has graduate training in Public Policy from the National University of Singapore (2007) and in Business Administration from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines (2003).