Adam Lichtenheld is an Assistant Professor of Peace Studies, Conflict Resolution, and International Relations at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), where he is a member of the War, Peace and Justice research group. His research examines the dynamics of forced displacement, armed conflict, political violence, peacebuilding, and post-conflict development, with a regional focus on Africa and the Middle East.

More information about Adam Lichtenheld

Adam Lichtenheld is an Assistant Professor of Peace Studies, Conflict Resolution, and International Relations at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), where he is a member of the War, Peace and Justice research group. His research examines the dynamics of forced displacement, armed conflict, political violence, peacebuilding, and post-conflict development, with a regional focus on Africa and the Middle East. Alongside his academic work, he has collaborated with governments, international donors, and NGOs to design and evaluate humanitarian,  development, and peacebuilding programmes in a dozen countries, with fieldwork spanning Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, Syria, and Uganda.

Book and awards

Dr. Lichtenheld is the author of Guilt by Location: Forced Displacement and Population Sorting in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Moving beyond instances of ethnic cleansing, the book demonstrates the extent to which displacement is a deliberate strategy of war, not just a by-product of it. Drawing on field research in Uganda and Syria, comparative case studies from Burundi, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and an original dataset of strategic displacement across 166 civil wars, the book argues that armed groups often uproot civilians not to expel a target population but to sort it—using human mobility as a heuristic to infer wartime loyalties through 'guilt by location.'

The book has been recognised with two major prizes: the 2026 ISA Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association, for the best book in the international politics of ethnicity, nationalism, and migration, and the 2025 Book of the Year Prize from the Conflict Research Society. The ISA award committee described it as 'genuinely field shaping,' bridging conflict studies and forced migration research 'in a way that is both theoretically innovative and policy-relevant.'

Research and publications

Dr. Lichtenheld's scholarly work appears in International Organization, Political Geography, the British Journal of Political Science, and Economics & Politics, with public-facing writing in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Just Security, The New Humanitarian, and The Conversation. He is also a contributing author to the Oxford Handbook of Internal Displacement (Oxford University Press, 2026). His 2020 International Organization article advancing an 'assortative' theory of forced relocation—the conceptual seed of the book—remains among the most-cited recent treatments of wartime displacement, and he has contributed a reference paper on strategic displacement to UNHCR's State of the World's Forcibly Displaced series.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Innovations for Poverty Action, the King Center on Global Development, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Experience

Before joining Leiden, Dr. Lichtenheld was Executive Director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, Senior Researcher for Peace and Conflict at the humanitarian NGO Mercy Corps, and a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Yale University. He has worked as a consultant for UNHCR, the World Bank, the Danish Refugee Council, Refugees International, and USAID. He holds a PhD and an MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Teaching

At ISGA, Dr. Lichtenheld teaches in the Advanced MSc in International Relations and Diplomacy, with courses on forced migration, conflict, peacebuilding, and research methods.