Adria Lawrence

Adria Lawrence is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. She writes about conflict and collective action, investigating how people come to mobilize in favor of ideologies such as ethnicity, nationalism, and democracy. Her book, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire, provides an account of how and why nationalist mobilization against colonial rule erupted. She has published on the use of violent and non-violent tactics by non-state actors in Rethinking Violence: States and Non State Actors in Conflict (co-edited with Erica Chenoweth, MIT Press, 2010) and in the journal International Security. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.

She is a scholar of Middle Eastern and North African politics. She lived in Morocco for several years and has traveled in the region. She is currently at work on two new book projects: one on collective action in the Arab Spring and a second on empires and the origins of cultural and racial exclusion. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Vassar College.