Raúl Sánchez De la Sierra

Raul Sanchez de la Sierra is Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which he joined in August 2026.

He comes to LSE from the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, where he received tenure in 2025. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and a scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2014–2015 and 2017–2018), and served on the tenure-track faculty of the University of California, Berkeley (2015–2019). He received his PhD in Economics from Columbia University in 2014, with a dissertation entitled "Essays on the Economics of Statelessness and State Formation"; his doctoral studies were supported by a fellowship from the "la Caixa" Foundation.

His research lies at the intersection of political economy and development economics, and draws on concepts from sociology and anthropology, as well as methods from psychology, with a focus on the origins of the state and the organization of violence. Most of his work is grounded in nearly two decades of primary data collection in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, combining original field surveys and experiments with historical and administrative data. His current projects examine the internal organization of nonstate violent organizations, the psychological foundations of the behavioral choice to engage in violence, and the consequences of enlistment in armed organizations. His research has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, J-PAL, IPA, CEPR, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), where he was a Global Scholar.

Alongside his academic work, he co-founded and co-directs — together with seven Congolese colleagues — Marakuja Kivu Research, a Congolese non-profit research organization based in Goma that conducts large-scale data collection in conflict-affected areas of North and South Kivu. The organization has trained hundreds of Congolese researchers and enumerators and has implemented fieldwork both for his own projects and for partners including the University of Oxford, the World Bank, USAID, and the United Nations. He has advised the World Bank, UNDP, USAID, the International Rescue Committee, and DFID/FCDO, and has collaborated with a number of grassroots civil-society organizations.

Raul's fields of study:

• Governance and Political Economy
• Economics of long-run development
• Economics and Psychology
• Power, violence, and the state
• Economics and anthropology

Key areas of study:

• The state
• Nonstate social and economic organization
• Social movements
• Economic, social, and psychological logic of violence