Omar García-Ponce was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Development. García-Ponce’s interests are broadly in violence, politics, and development. He has two main lines of ongoing research. One examines how armed conflict affects political behavior and the development of institutions. The other is on the political economy of organized crime, with a focus on the US-Mexico drug trade. His work appears or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of the European Economic Association. He is receiving a PhD in political science from New York University.