Welcome
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. I am working in the Lab’s Migration and Development Initiative to find policy solutions for the challenges of displaced persons in developing countries.
My research is situated at the intersection between conflict studies and migration research. I want to understand how individuals and households make decisions to move under high risk like conflict, poverty and climate-induced stress. I am particularly interested in questions such as: how do civilians make the choice to flee, how do governments and other actors respond to displacement on the local level, how can we predict (forced) migration in light of changing conflict patterns, and what impact does human mobility have on societies in developing countries? I am also interested in how vulnerable populations - the displaced but also women, stateless populations and ethnic minorities - engage with the state after conflict and reclaim their rights to housing, documentation and access to economic opportunities in fragile settings. I predominantly use quantitative methods - spatial statistics, machine learning but also survey experiments and randomized control trials - in my work. I have conducted several surveys in the context of Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and East Africa.
I have received a PhD in Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University College London (UCL) in 2023. I have previously worked as consultant for the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement. I completed a MSc in Security Studies at UCL and a BA in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany. You can contact me at sigweber@stanford.edu. My CV can be downloaded here.