Howard L
- Research Program Mentor
PhD at Duke University
Expertise
political science, international relations, conflict and war, political violence, authoritarian politics, computational social science, network analysis, experiments, causal inference
Bio
I’m a political scientist interested in how governments across the world maintain control, especially through repression, surveillance, and political violence. My research looks at how governments use institutions like the police, courts, and informant networks to manage dissent, and how these strategies evolve in response to opposition movements. I’m particularly drawn to questions that sit at the intersection of theory and method, using tools like network and spatial analysis to better understand complex political dynamics. I play basketball and enjoy spending time in nature.Project ideas
How Authoritarian Regimes Suppress Critics Abroad
Students could explore how authoritarian regimes attempt to suppress critics beyond their own borders. A student might focus on a specific country and examine cases where activists, journalists, or dissidents living abroad face harassment, surveillance, or intimidation. This could involve collecting publicly reported incidents, such as threats, online harassment, or pressure on family members back home, and organizing them into a small dataset. Alternatively, students could use existing datasets to investigate these dynamics. The project could then examine patterns in when and where these actions occur, or how they relate to political events in the home country. This project would give students experience working with real-world data and developing a research question, while remaining flexible in scope. Students could approach it qualitatively by analyzing a few detailed case studies, or quantitatively by identifying broader trends across cases.