Livia Schubiger, Duke University

Livia Schubiger is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. At Duke, she is a member of the Department of Political Science and the DevLab@Duke. Prior to joining Duke, she was an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics (Department of Government). She was also a post-doctoral researcher at the UZH-ETH Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS), and a pre-doctoral visiting fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University.

Her research examines the short- and long-run consequences of state repression and political violence. She studies these relationships with a particular focus on insurgent organizations and civilian communities. Her work also investigates the role of non-state actors in the provision and transformation of political order, the intersections of political violence and organized crime, and the micro-foundations of inter-group solidarity and conflict. Methodologically, she is particularly interested in causal inference for observational studies, natural experiments, and survey experimental designs. Herresearch also draws on methodological strategies and tools from other disciplines, such as the evaluation of archival material and geographic information systems.

She is currently working on a book project that explores the impact of state-led civilian victimization on subsequent patterns of wartime collective action and institutional change. The manuscript builds on her dissertation on the consequences of wartime indiscriminate state violence. The dissertation was awarded the Prize for Excellence in Applied Development Research (1st prize, young researcher category) by the Research Group on Development Economics of the German Economic Association and the KfW Development Bank. She was also shortlisted for the Jean Blondel PhD Prize and received the SIAF Award 2015, the Prize for the Best PhD Thesis from the UZH Department of Political Science, and the Annual Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the University of Zurich’s Division for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Her research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Swiss Network for International Studies, among others. Some of her co-authored work was awarded the MPSA Best Paper by Emerging Scholar Award.