Event

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Sara Plana will present findings from her book project on how the US attempted to control armed groups in Syria. Leveraging new evidence, including interviews with American special operators who deployed in Syria, she pieces together the untold history of American intervention in Syria, providing frameworks to understand when and why the US can have influence over non-state partners. 

Sara Plana is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a pre-doctoral fellow at the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2020-2021 academic year. Her book project examines how states control non-state armed groups they sponsor in foreign civil wars through in-depth, multi-method case studies of state-proxy relationships in the Syrian civil war from 2011 to present. She is a Fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project, a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a co-founder of the Future Strategy Forum. She graduated with an A.B. from Harvard University.