Welcome!

Melissa (Mel) Pavlik is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University researching repression and resistance. Her academic work addresses the political economy and geography of informality, the consequences of attempts to address climate change, and micro-dynamics of coercion and political violence, especially in West Africa. She also works on issues of causal inference and measurement, particularly data missingness and the use of geospatial data and networks. Her dissertation project focuses on how states use uneven enforcement patterns to ‘produce precarity’ among populations displaced by conflict and climate change, fostering their exploitation by powerful allies. This project features insight from fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria.

Before graduate school, Mel spent years mapping and analyzing data on political violence for NGOs, conflict observatories, and think tanks, including most recently at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Her analysis has been published across a wide variety of outlets, including The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, World Politics Review, and Foreign Policy.