María Ballesteros is the Rhodes Geopolitics Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. María's research focuses on the political economy of conflict, crime, and illicit economies. She examines how the characteristics of legal markets and the institutions that regulate them shape armed group strategy during civil and criminal war. Her work draws on a range of methods, with an emphasis on causal inference, spatial analysis, and the analysis of large-scale data. María holds a Ph.D. and an MA in Political Science from Harvard University and a BA from ITAM in Mexico City.