James C. Scott (1936-2024) was the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University, where he founded the Program in Agrarian Studies. He worked 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). Then, in his own words, he went "off the deep end" and began writing works that are celebrated in other fields, especially anthropology and history. His final work, In Praise of Floods (Yale University Press, 2025), was published posthumously.
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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).
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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 content that takes an increasing variety of forms, ranging from university presses to graphic novels to game content. In the most recent "what did you do in 2022" post-COVID episode, he discusses his MARU (Mobile Archive Research Unit) vision and university legal liability for sensitive data.
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Jesse Driscoll is a professor of political science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego. He works on Central Eurasia, and is the author three books including Doing Global Fieldwork: A Social Scientist's Guide To Mixed-Methods Research Far From Home (Columbia) and Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge 2023, with Dominique Arel). In our "what did you do in 2022" post-COVID episode, he shares observations from the Pentagon where he served as Ukraine Desk Officer in the plans division of the Joint Staff (J-5, ENR).
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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.
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Asfandyar Mir is currently a Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Stimson Center. Previously, he was a senior expert at USIP, focusing on South Asia in the context of U.S. counterterrorism policy. His research on the International Relations of South Asia, political violence, and intersection of social media and politics has appeared in peer-reviewed journals like International Security and International Studies Quarterly and is a frequent contributor to venues such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, H-Diplo, Lawfare, the Modern War Institute, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more. Follow him on X @asfandyarmir.
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Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science 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 is a founding member of the ARC (Advancing Research on Conflict) Consortium.
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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 -- and has already been translated into both Russian and Kazakh.
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Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor in the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice, affiliation with Political Science and with Women’s and Gender Studies, all at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In addition to 15 books (!), she has published in Ms. Magazine and The Village Voice, lectured all over the world, and appeared frequently on National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, C-Span and the BBC. Among her many accolades is the Peace and Justice Studies Association’s Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award.
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David Cunningham is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research, focused on racial contention and its legacies, has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He is also an an instructor and Executive Board member for Washington University’s Prison Education Project. His most recent award-winning book is Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan.
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David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has mentored dozens of scholars (including both podcast hosts). He has conducted field research in Somalia, Yorubaland (Nigeria), Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, and France. His research focuses on issues of language, religion, and how cultural phenomena link nations to states. Though he has recently transitioned to emeritus, he is still actively publishing in the discipline and co-directs the Immigration Policy Lab.
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Sarah Parkinson is the Aronson Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines organizational behavior and social change in context of war and disaster. For her first book, Beyond the Lines (Cornell 2023), she conducted extensive fieldwork among Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon. She is a co-founder of the ARC (Advancing Research in Conflict) Consortium.
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Margaret Levi holds many titles, including Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, and the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. In addition to her many other honors, she was awarded the Johan Skytte prize for "having laid the foundations of our understanding of why citizens accept state coercion". Her research agenda continues to shape our field.
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Ana Bracic is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Michigan State University. Her research is on human rights, discrimination, the persistence of social exclusion, and ground-level effectiveness of human rights institutions, such as NGOs. Her book, Breaking the Exclusion Cycle: How to Promote Cooperation between Majority and Minority Ethnic Groups, was recognized as the best book published in 2020 by the APSA Experimental Research Section.
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Kristine Eck is Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, having previously served as Director of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and as the Director of the Uppsala Rotary Peace Center. Her primary research interests concern state coercion and policing, and she is currently leading a project on Variation in Institutional Oversight of Police Misconduct (comparing how OECD democracies respond to charges of police abuse).
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Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies. She studies the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, and forced migration, and has conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians since 2012. In this podcast we discuss how this data was curated ("midwife-ing") to create the award-winning We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017).
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Roger Petersen is a Professor of Political Science (Emeritus) at MIT, where he taught since 2001 as the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. He has written extensively on Eastern Europe, and his research focus maps variation in patterns of within-state conflict and violence, with a theoretical focus on emotions as "triggering mechanisms" for shifts in conflict roles. His most recent book is Death, Domination, and State-Building: The U.S. in Iraq and the Future of American Military Intervention (Oxford 2024).
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Mark Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Author or editor of six books and dozens of classic articles, his areas of interest are social movements, revolutions, nationalism, state-building, and imperialism. His most book is The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton 2022). In the discussion he reflects on fieldwork conditions in Soviet Russia to the chaos of the 1990s to the (bleak) landscape that contemporary social scientists confront in Russia today.
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Kirsten Weld is a professor of history at Harvard University. Her research explores struggles over inequality, justice, and historical memory in 20th-century Latin America. Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014), is a historical and ethnographic study of a remarkable cache of secret police files: tools of state repression during the country’s civil war. This book was recognized with the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section. Her second book will explore the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas.
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Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a thought leader in the ethical dimensions of the experimental turn in the social sciences. She is the author or co-author of six books, two edited volumes, and over 200 academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines on a diversity of topics ranging from American foreign policy, gender, social identity, emotion and decision-making, the biological and genetic bases of political behavior, and more.
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Michael Kofman is a leading analyst of the Russian Armed Forces and a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Born in Kyiv, fluent in Russian, and holding a MA from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, Kofman has authored dozens of academic chapters, articles, and reports, previously directed the Russia Studies Program at CNA (the Center for Naval Analysis) and has held fellowships at the Center for a New American Security and the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center. Since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kofman has emerged as one of the most trustworthy commentators of the operational military picture because of his regular fieldwork trips .
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Dana El Kurd is an associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. Her research focuses on Palestinian and broader Arab politics, with particular attention to political mobilization, public opinion, and the effects of international intervention. Her first book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines how authoritarian structures shape political engagement across Palestinian institutions. El Kurd’s work has appeared in Global Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Democratization, as well as The Nation, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and the Financial Times.
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Amaney A. Jamal is the Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University. A leading scholar of political behavior and development in the Middle East and North Africa, her work also examines inequality, civic engagement, and the politics of race, religion, and immigration. Her first book, Barriers to Democracy (2007), won the 2008 APSA Comparative Democratization Best Book Award. She is co-Principal Investigator of the award-winning Arab Barometer project and author or editor of several books and articles in major political science journals. Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2006.
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