Paul Staniland is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also the Associate Chair of the Political Science Department, and previously served two terms as faculty director of the Committee on International Relations MA program. Staniland’s research focuses on political violence and international security, with a regional emphasis on South and Southeast Asia. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, was published by Cornell in 2021. Staniland received the 2022 Karl Deutsch Award for contributions to the study of International Relations and Peace Research from the International Studies Association. He is working on a new book about how third-party states have navigated, and been affected by, major power rivalry in post-1945 southern Asia.

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.

Second, we are seeing a wave of research on international politics in Asia that is connected to broader IR questions and debates. This seems to be driven by the combination of real-world interest in US-China competition and its implications with the growing range of methodologies that can be applied to these questions, ranging from archival research in IR to survey experiments to text-as-data analysis to elite interviews. This is a first-tier policy question that can be cut into with interesting and rewarding social science approaches.

Third, the field of civil-military relations seems to be returning to relevance, and seeing a renewal of political science interest. After a long period when militaries were seen as in political retreat, there has been a surge of coups and subtler but important military interventions in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. Moreover, other forms of authoritarian regimes, whether personalist or single-party, still need to deal with their militaries. We are seeing new methods applied to these questions, including surveys and historical datasets, as well as new opportunities for cross-case analysis.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

During graduate school, I became increasingly interested in thinking about processes and changes over time. I remember my dissertation chair Roger Petersen reading an early chunk of my........

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