Research Expertise and Interest

post-conflict elections, policing, peace processes, civil conflict, foreign intervention, armed actor governance, armed actor social support, counterinsurgency, survey experiments, mixed-method research design, Central America, Colombia, Solomon Islands, West Africa

Research Description

Aila M. Matanock is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines a variety of international and domestic influences on the stability of fragile states, especially elections in these contexts, bringing together insights from international relations and comparative politics. In recent work, she looks at policing and community attitudes during crisis. She seeks to better understand how different actors can foster peace and improve governance outcomes. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Minerva Research Initiative, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press. It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association. Her work has also been published by the Annual Review of Political Science, Governance, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and elsewhere. She worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and she has held fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD since. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.