 All right. So again, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be able to join. It looks like a really nice crowd in the audience and excited to hear your thoughts on this project. So this is a project on both how we measure territorial control as well as the way that we can think about the origins of territorial control. So really excited to hear feedback, especially from those of you who work on where rebel groups come from. And I want to also highlight that this is a bit of a joint venture. What I'm going to be presenting to you here right now is a measurement exercise with an application, but it's part of a broader research agenda than involves folks like Maria Ballesteros, who's now a PhD student at Harvard as well as Chris Blair, who will be starting in the fall of Princeton. So as a bit of a bit of a motivation, since this is a group of us that are interested in armed groups, none of what I'm about to say will come as a surprise, but I think it's worth just briefly restating, which is that territorial control, the idea that an armed group, whether that armed group be the state or a rebel organization, the fact that it can contest and control a physical territory matters during conflict. It's going to influence the emergence of rebel organizations, whether or not it, for example, territorial control enables them to engage in tax collection, the provision of quasi state functions, or the partial consolidation of political authority during an ongoing conflict. It's also going to be the case that territorial control influences how these wars are fought. And so these small wars are often contests over the control of a population, as well as the flow of information, both to and from armed groups and to the actors and civilians. Of course, beyond that, it's also going to influence, and this is where I think especially the policy relevant site is thinking about after conflict ends, what happens with reconstruction and development. And of course, these areas of control that are contested by insurgents during the war can eventually become pockets of resistance, even if the state wins a consolidated victory. But these might also be places that in the wake of a rebel led victory might be exposed to disproportionate political and economic transfers. And yet, despite the fact that territorial control is central to the way that we think about how wars emerge, how those wars are fought and what happens after a civil conflict ends, it is perhaps the least well measured concept in the field. And so the existing measures in the field right now typically rely either on present or historical measures of rebel activity, especially rebel violence, or expert assessments. And so the tricky part about relying on rebel violence in order to measure where rebels have control is that usually that means that violence is going to be on both sides of the equation. Since in the end, we typically are interested in studying the effects of control on the ability to produce violence. So violence on one side of the regression violence on the other. And it's also the case that in order to think about this relationship between violence and control, we either have to assume that control is linear or is very specifically nonlinear in particular kinds of violence. And this again requires making a series of otherwise largely unfounded assumptions about the production of violence and its generalizability across conflicts. And so that's perhaps the reason why reliance on violence is a historical measure of control is problematic, but it's also the case that many of these studies focus on the use of expert assessments. Now, these also don't come with a few drawbacks, which is usually that they're tied to a foreign military actor. They're subject to what we might think of as the political economy of data collection, when and where the data is collected, as well as when it's released. There's a political dynamic there as well. It's also typically sensitive or classified or limited access, which means it's only going to be available for a small number of conflicts or a very small number of individuals, especially scholars can have access to them. And more broadly, these kinds of expert assessments are going to be available for a very small number of conflicts, conflicts throughout modern history, and they're going to be a nonrandom set of conflicts, right? So we might have concerns about generalizability. So a bit about what I'm hoping that we'll be able to talk about today and hopefully get your feedback on, which is I'm going to walk you through an initial idea for a novel measure of territorial control that I think, and my colleagues think have potentially very broad applications to the field beyond just the place where we're going to study it. I'm then going to show you some preliminary evidence where we implement and we can validate this theoretical measure. And then I'm going to talk to you a little bit about if we have time, the economic origins of control. And in particular, we're going to leverage something about the economic shocks that occur in Afghanistan that vary both across years and across space. But their value is also going to vary within Europe, which we can take advantage of. All right. So a little bit about measuring control. And so just to take a step back, right? The state emerges in part because of its ability to collect and operationalize information on the civilian population. So this is sort of the core notion behind legibility. The fact that the state can gather demographic details. It can identify where taxable assets exist. And there's also an interest in being able to understand the attitudes and preferences of the subjects of the government, right? And information is central to modern state functions as well, especially the provisional public services. Understanding civilian needs is going to be a core input to understanding where those civilian projects need to be dedicated. And so this is true in general, but you can think that the role of information, especially high quality information is going to be heightened during civil conflict, where the state and its allies are likely to invest very heavily in gathering information about civilian life, patterns of movement, as well as mapping the preferences of various authorities. And one type of authority is the rebel side. Okay. And so the ability of governments to collect information itself is going to reflect state capacity. And that's because the information that's collected is going to vary in quality. And that variation in quality can serve as an indicator of state capacity. And I think this is a series of really important work involving usually A-cheeping and census data folks like Suresh Naidu and Jesse Jusko, as well as Melissa Lee and others, have really been able to take advantage of what can we learn from the quality of the data collected by the state. And yet, this particular approach is actually a second stage outcome. So information quality is a second stage outcome, where the first stage is at least equally important, but we think is potentially more important is can the state even collect information at all? And if it can't collect information, why can't it? And both the ability to collect information in general, as well as the downstream quality of that information, is going to vary with time and space. And that's what we're attempting to explore. And you might think that something like the ideal approach would be to think about high frequency attempts to collect information, something like a census. But unfortunately, a census is usually collected in a manner that's not very high frequency. And they're actually least common in exactly the cases that we would want to study. And so think about cases that are fragile or weakly institutionalized context. Census collection is actually rather infrequent, if it occurs at all. As an alternative, there are actually quite a few domestic and international agencies that contract with survey companies to conduct hundreds of sub-nationally representative field surveys each year. And often those surveys are conducted in exactly the missing cases where that census data doesn't exist. And so perhaps there's something that we can we can learn from there. And the idea is that the sampling resampling design of the surveys is itself a data generating process, especially if you can think about metadata on failed enumeration as potentially providing you insights on pockets of inaccessibility. And so what this looks like is that there was an attempt to conduct a survey in a particular place. But it failed for any number of reasons. If you have metadata both on the failure and why it occurred, you can potentially identify those pockets of inaccessibility. And so to kind of walk you through as a brief overview of what we talked about so far, you can imagine that regardless of what we studied, whether or not it's census records or survey data, there's always an attempt to collect information. So there's always an enumeration attempt. And in the past, what folks have been focused on is on this first branch, which is that the sampling outcome was successful. So there was the ability to collect information and then attempts to think about what can we learn conditional on sampling success from variation of the quality? So is the data high fidelity or low fidelity? That's what the existing approach has taken. What we suggest theoretically is that you can take advantage of information from the lack of signal because of the failure of the enumeration event in general. And so of course, there are many reasons why a failure could occur. It could be something like a failure of state capacity, like a lack of transportation. It could be something like the presence of other non state actors that are largely irrelevant to territorial control, or it could be something like rebels denial of entry to outsiders. And so that's what we're going to attempt to take advantage of. And so our particular application is going to be in Afghanistan. And we're going to be focused on enumerability there. And so during the most recent conflict, informations on civilians and their preferences were a backbone of military and political assessments. There was one firm in particular, which is XOR, which was contracted by a number of both military and non military agencies and organizations, as well as quite few academics who work in Afghanistan to conduct nearly continuous field based survey data collection. And so their survey enumeration efforts ended up reaching more than a million survey respondents from 2009 to 2020. And their collection of in person data ended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And so a few things about their sampling design. So they stratified by province and then they selected districts for enumeration proportional to population. To improve the efficiency of their operations, the firm actually collected and continuously updated essentialized database of enumerator access to all of Afghanistan's districts. So sampling can fail for a number of reasons. As we talked about before, it could be a failure of state capacity because of weak transportation. It could be something having to do with local weather conditions. But most importantly, for thinking about trying to draw inferences about territorial control, there's denial of entry by an armed actor. And so it turns out that XOR both is classifying enumerability, but they break it down by subcodes, including whether or not the enumerators were denied access by the Taliban. And so what this ends up looking like is a district by month panel that tracks accessibility across the entire country to enumerators and breaks down the accessibility in particular places that are inaccessible. Why were they inaccessible? It breaks them down by subcodes, including specifically whether or not these outside actors were denied access by by the Taliban. Austin, I'm sorry, but can I ask you to wrap up because I tried to show you this. Oh, yes, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, we're almost there. Almost done. So and so because of that, you know, one key thing is that we were granted access to this. And so what we can do is we can tie that survey enumerability measure to a series of other expert based assessments, including those that are currently classified by the by the US military. And effectively, although there are these large differences gaps in the number of districts that are classified as under rebel control, there is actually a pretty substantial consistent trend in the direction of shifts and control, especially after the US withdrawal. And so hopefully at some point later on, we'll have an opportunity to talk about the economic origins of territorial control. But for now, the tremendous to get your to get your thoughts on the basic measurement concept. So thanks again, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts.