MWI Fellow, 2018–20
Matthew Cancian is a PhD student in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. His research focuses on motivations to violence from recruitment through combat to reconciliation. His specific projects include research on the effectiveness of training on combat motivation and the effect of past victimization on attitudes towards enemy combatants using data from a survey of Kurdish fighters in Iraq. Before MIT, he earned a Masters of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School, earning the Edmund A. Gullion award for academic achievement.