Moshe Ben Hamo Yeger

Residency: October 2022 – May 2023

Research Project: Popular Mobilization in Criminal Wars: Explaining Collective Action in Mexico’s Criminal Conflict

Research Interests: criminal violence, political violence, political behavior, social movements, arms trafficking, foreign policy

Moshe Ben Hamo is a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) candidate in politics at the University of Oxford. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the intersection between criminal violence and politics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. Over the past few years, he has published on a range of issues such as small-arms trade, drug-related violence and citizen behavior in conflict settings. For his doctoral dissertation, he is exploring social responses to large-scale criminal violence.

More specifically he is studying the emergence, trajectories and impacts of groups of civilians that arm themselves to resist criminal violence. To answer his research questions, he uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. He produced an original dataset on violent and non-violent popular mobilization in Mexico from 2013 to 2018 and conducted fieldwork in the states of Guerrero, Michoacán, Puebla and Zacatecas. Moshe holds a bachelor’s in international relations from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), a master’s in political science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) and a master’s in Latin American Studies from Oxford’s Latin American Center. Previously, he worked for the Mexican Ministry of Social Development and the Small Arms Survey. He has also done consultancy work for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).