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15 August 2024

Interview – Paul Stanilan


Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

There are so many possible answers to this question. Sometimes it seems fashionable to be down on the discipline and cynical about research, and do I understand why. But there are so many important and interesting topics available for study these days; I think there is a lot of exciting work going on and that could be done. I’ll pick a couple just as examples.

First, a lot of great new work is being done on electoral politics and violence, from patronage networks to armed political parties to how insurgents try to influence elections to state repression of electoral rivals. This work is pushing a lot of boundaries in very productive ways, across contexts and methods. It taps into big-picture scholarship on democratic backsliding (as well as those skeptical of that framing), political parties, state formation, and the quality of democracy, sitting nicely at the center of several pressing and important topics.

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