Despoina Karamperidou

Despina Karamperidou is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the European University Institute. Her research interests revolve around post-conflict state-building and the political economy of civil wars. In her doctoral dissertation, she studies state-business relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and examines the impact of business associations on the performance of local government institutions. During her time at Yale, she will write-up her thesis and work on two papers: one developing a theory of business-based state-building and another exploring the link between economic power-sharing and the sustainability of peace. Despina holds a B.A. (IR & Economics) from the University of Aberystwyth and master’s degrees from the University of Bristol (M.Sc. Economics), the University of Macedonia (M.A. Southeast European Politics), and the European University Institute (M.Res. Political Science). She has worked as a consultant for UNICEF-Innocenti and has participated in several EU-funded research projects dealing with migration and the EU Balkan enlargement. She has also completed two pre-doctoral fellowships at the University of Sarajevo and the Central European University.