James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University, where he founded the Program in Agrarian Studies. He works on Southeast Asia, the peasantry, agriculture, state-making, resistance and anarchism. In his early career he published in venues like the American Political Science Review (twice -- once in 1969 and again  1972).  Since then, in his own words, he has gone "off the deep end" and began writing works that are celebrated in other fields, especially anthropology and history.  His most recent book is: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States, (Yale, 2017).  

The Scott Archive

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College, and Co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship is situated at the intersection of political theory, comparative politics, and cultural anthropology.  Her research interests relate to authoritarian mechanisms of social control, artistic transgressions, the operation of democratic practices in the absence of  democratic regimes, discourse analysis, ideology critique, and affect theory. Her most recent, award-winning book is Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago, 2019).

The Wedeen Archive

Christian Davenport is the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Professor of the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies.   His research interests include political conflict and violence, measurement, racism, and popular culture.  He is the author, co-author, or editor of seven academic books.  He is also the co-author (with Derek Ritter) of RW-94: Reflections on Rwanda (2019), which became the focal point for our conversation in this "meet the hosts" podcast.

The Davenport Archive

Jesse Driscoll is an associate professor of political science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego.  His primary research interest is state-building processes, with a geographical focus on Central Eurasia.  His "meet the hosts" podcast is primarily a discussion of his early fieldwork experience as a graduate student in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, but his most recent book takes a wider aperture:  Doing Global Fieldwork: a Social Scientist's Guide to Mixed-Methods Research Far From Home (Columbia 2020). 

The Driscoll Archive

Robert H. Bates is a professor emeritus at Harvard University, where he held a position as the Eaton Professor of Science of Government for many years.  He  conducted most of his research in post-colonial Africa (especially Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana) and has written extensively the political roots of agricultural policies, the  welfare impacts of those policies, and the sources of political violence more generally.  He has been a tireless advocate for fieldwork  and mentored hundreds of us.

The Bates Archive

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is the director of the Center for Governance and Markets and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her main research focus is on issues of political economy, security, and development in Central Eurasia, and she is the author or co-author of three books, most recently Land, The State, and War (Cambridge 2021).  She is a frequent media presence , a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and the President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. 

The Murtazashvili Archive

Leonard Wantchekon is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the founder and president of the African School of Economics, which opened in his native Benin in 2014.   His research interests include social mobility, social trust, education (as an outcome and as an input), the long-run legacy of the slave trade on African societies, racism, clientelism, peaceful political transitions from autocracy, and more. 

The Wantchekon Archive

Zachariah Mampilly is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at CUNY and the co-founder of the Program on African Social Research.  He is the author or co-author of four books has written extensively on social movements, mass protest movements, rebel governance, the theory and practice of peace-building, and a great deal more.  He is a frequent contributor to outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, and The Washington Post. 

The Mampilly Archive

Tariq Thachil is the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania.  His  research focus is on political parties and the political consequences of urbanization in South Asia.  His first book was honored by the American Political Science Association with both the Gregory Luebbert Award (for the Best Book in Comparative Politics) and the Leon Epstein Award (for the Best Book on Political Parties).

The Thatchil Archive

Asfandyar Mir is a Senior Expert at the United States Institute of Peace and an affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His research is on the International Relations of South Asia, political violence, and intersection of social media and politics.  His research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals like International Security and in policy venues such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, H-Diplo, Lawfare, Modern War Institute, New York Times, Political Violence at a Glance, Politico, and Washington Post.

The Mir Archive

Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a Scheidt Faculty Fellow in Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University (SUNY). She studies how organization and identity influence dynamics of political challenge in polarized societies, with a current focus on the contemporary American case. Her written work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and The British Journal of Political Science, and her research-based public commentary is broadcast regularly on old and new media platforms.

The Bond Archive

Sarah Cameron is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union with particular research interests in crimes against humanity, environmental history, and the societies of Central Asia.  Her first book, The Hungry Steppe:  Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell, 2018),  won the Reginald Zelnick Book Prize, the W. Bruce Lincoln Book prize, the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, and the Richard Stites award. 

The Cameron Archive (SOON!)