Grace Lan is a Graduate School Student in the Yale Department of Political Science.
Melissa Pavlik is a PhD candidate in the Yale Department of Political Science studying the political economy and geography of repression and resistance, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Her research interests include micro-dynamics of political violence, conflict actor decision making, and mapping patterns of coercion and violent control, particularly across the informal sector. She also works on issues of causal inference and measurement, especially observational inference and the production of conflict datasets. Her dissertation project focuses on how uneven state enforcement patterns ‘produce precarity’ among vulnerable populations in the Global South, especially targeting those internally displaced due to conflict and climate change.