Student Associates

Consuelo Amat is a Ph.D. student in political science. Her research interests include civil resistance, collective action and political violence. She holds a B.A. in International Affairs and Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University’s Department of Government. Prior to coming to Yale, Consuelo worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution, where she focused on democratization and security in Latin America, and at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, where she tracked ongoing popular struggles. Additional professional experience includes working on U.S. foreign policy issues for three years at Human Rights Watch and Peace Action West in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Julia Bleckner is a Ph.D. student in political science, specializing in comparative politics and qualitative methods. Her research interests include social psychological foundations of conflict, political violence, peacekeeping, and human rights. She holds a B.A. in Diplomacy and World Affairs from Occidental College. Prior to coming to Yale, Julia worked as a senior research associate in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch where she focused on sexual violence and torture in South Asia, and as a Fulbright research fellow in Bangladesh where she studied the impact all-female peacekeeping units in deterring sexual violence in UN missions. She has worked throughout South and Southeast Asia. Additional professional experience includes research consultancy on various projects related to sexual and reproductive rights for the Harvard Program on International Health and Human Rights and for the UN office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on gender mainstreaming.

Sophia Dawkins is a Ph.D student in Political Science at Yale University with a research focus on how peace process design affects civilian experiences of violence during and after negotiated settlements. Prior to her Ph.D, Sophia worked on peacebuilding and peace mediation projects in South Sudan and the Abyei Area of the former Sudan. A graduate of the University of Oxford and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, she was named to the Diplomatic Courier’s 2013 list of 99 most influential foreign policy leaders under 33 years of age.

Danny Hirschel-Burns is a PhD student in the comparative politics of violence, governance, and state-building, specifically wartime political orders, non-state governance, civilian agency in conflict, and histories of state-building. He would like to work on how Sub-Saharan Africa will likely be his main geographic focus, and he is interested in primarily historical and ethnographic research methods.

Prior to Yale, Danny attended Swarthmore College and worked in Washington DC for two years, doing research on atrocity prevention and international security.

Michael Kalin is currently a doctoral student in political science at Yale specializing in Comparative Politics and International Relations. His interests include political violence, international security and foreign policy, with an emphasis on the Middle East and Central Asia. Previously, he worked as a political analyst supporting the Government of Canada’s National Security Advisor and as a policy officer in Afghanistan with the Canadian embassy in Kabul and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

William M. Kwok is a PhD student in Political Science at Yale University, specializing in comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. His research interests include insurgency, state-sponsored violence, “identity-based” conflict, and East and Southeast Asian politics. Prior to graduate school, William worked at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a BA in Political Science and Film and Electronic Media from Bard College.

Stephen Moncrief is a PhD student in the Political Science Department at Yale University. His research concerns peacekeeping, international intervention, and political violence.

Stephen has an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and a BA from Western Washington University.

Will Nomikos is a PhD candidate in Political Science. His research focuses on peacekeeping after civil wars, particularly in the Western Balkans, and the role of electoral competition in the making of security policy in democracies. He’s also written on democratization after foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) and the varieties of power-sharing regimes that emerge after conflict. He holds a BA in International Affairs from George Washington University and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago

Lauren Pinson is a Ph.D. student in Political Science. Her evolving research interests fall at the nexus of international security and international political economy. She holds an AB in International Affairs and an MPA focused in public policy analysis from the University of Georgia. Prior to coming to Yale, Lauren worked as a senior researcher and project manager at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, where she focused on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear terrorism.

Mara Revkin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Yale University, where her research focuses on governance and lawmaking by armed groups. Her dissertation examines the state-building project (and eventual state failure) of the Islamic State (IS) through multi-method data collection and analysis of archival documents, social media data, surveys, and interviews conducted during extensive fieldwork in Turkey and Iraq. Mara holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and is also working on projects concerning the legal status of civilians who have lived in areas controlled and governed by terrorist groups.

Niloufer Siddiqui is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University, studying comparative politics and international relations. Her research interests include political violence, sectarian conflict, and political behavior. Her dissertation examines the variation in the use of violence by political parties in Pakistan. Niloufer holds an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in English from Haverford College.

Drew Stommes is a Ph.D. student in political science specializing in comparative politics, international relations, and quantitative methods. In particular, his research examines the intersection of elections and political violence in South Asia. Prior to coming to Yale, Drew received an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science from Saint John’s University in Minnesota.

Andrés R. Vargas Castillo is a PhD student in Political Science at Yale University. His research interests include collective action and social movements in civil wars and political violence. Research to date focuses in Colombia, where he has studied diverse topics including the relationship between institutional development, territory and violence in the south of the country, policy options to terminate violent conflict with ELN insurgency, and community based non-violent resistance. He holds a B.A. in political science from Universidad Javeriana and is an Associate Researcher of the Bogotá based Research Center for Conflict Analysis.

Louis Wasser held two appointments at Yale in 2019-20, Postdoctoral Associate at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, and he is currently a Research Affiliate in the latter. He received his PhD from Yale in December 2019, with his three-paper dissertation (“Anti-Regime and Separatist Opposition Strategies: Institutional and Extra-Institutional, Violent and Nonviolent”) focusing on the origins and consequences of variation in opposition strategies. Studying this issue required constructing two large-N datasets of opposition strategies: one for separatist movements and a second for anti-regime campaigns. The secessionist dataset is presented in a co-authored paper published in 2019 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Louis was a Minerva-USIP Peace and Security Scholar in 2018-19, and his work has also been supported financially by the MacMillan Center. Before graduate school, he worked as a Cairo-based journalist, and his writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Financial Times, among other places.

Remco Zwetsloot is a PhD candidate in Political Science, with a focus on comparative politics, political economy, and quantitative methods. His research focuses on mechanisms that can decrease inter-group conflict, with a particular focus on post-civil war settings. He is working on projects on peacekeeping, post-conflict power sharing, and reputation in international relations. Remco holds a BA (summa cum laude) in Social Science from University College Roosevelt and an MPhil (distinction) in International Relations from the University of Oxford.