Violence, Conflict, and Security Lab (ViCS)

Sebastian Elischer is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. His work examines statehood, democracy, and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. He has published two monographs on these topics with Cambridge University Press. His 2021 book Salafism and Political Order was named as one of the best books in African politics by Foreign Affairs. His article publications have appeared in Comparative Politics, African Affairs, Review of African Political Economy and similar journals. During the 2021-2022 academic year Elischer was a research fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has provided expert advice and testimony to the Department of Defense and several government agencies in Europe.
 

Lindsey A. Goldberg is an Assistant Professor of International Relations, specializing in Feminist IR. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender and global conflict with particular emphasis on gendered experiences within and across armed rebel movements. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa where she also completed a graduate certificate in gender, women’s and sexuality studies. Her current book project explores the relationships between rebel ideologies, the development of masculinities and femininities, and the perpetration of reproductive violence across armed rebel movements. Lindsey’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Conflict Management and Peace Science and The British Journal of Political Science.
 

Juliana Restrepo Sanín is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Her current book project analyzes violence and harassment against women politicians in Latin America, the role of women’s activism in bringing attention to this problem, and the development and effectiveness of state measures to end it. Before joining the faculty at the University of Florida, Dr. Restrepo Sanín was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies (University of Denver) and the One Earth Future foundation. Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Signs, Politics & Gender, International Feminist Journal of Politics; European Journal of Politics and Gender; and Política y Gobierno.
 

Zach Selden is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His work focuses on American foreign policy, national security, and transatlantic relations. His most recent book is Alignment, Alliance, and American Grand Strategy (University of Michigan Press, 2016). His current work examines how emerging technology in Artificial Intelligence affects state expectations of future conflict. He was previously an analyst with the Congressional Budget Office and Deputy Secretary General of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
 

David S. Siroky is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, Core Faculty of the Florida Institute for National Security, and current Co-Director of the Violence, Conflict and Security Lab. His research has appeared in more than forty articles in leading scholarly journals and in Defection Denied: A Study of Civilian Support for Insurgency in Irregular War (Elements in Experimental Political Science, Cambridge University Press, 2022), which analyzes the nature and sources of civilian support for militant groups during wartime utilizing unobtrusive survey experiments.
 

Ben Smith is UF Term Professor of Political Science, Interim Director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies and current Co-Director of the Violence, Conflict and Security Lab. His current research and teaching focus on the politics of resource wealth, on ethnic and nationalist mobilization, and on civil wars. His first book, Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty, was published in 2007 by Cornell University Press. His second book, co-authored with David Waldner, Rethinking the Resource Curse, was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Civil Wars, Ethnic Conflict, Oil in Global Politics, and Politics Under Authoritarianism.
 

Yunizar Adiputera is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. He specializes in International Relations and Comparative Politics as his first and second fields, respectively. His research interests center around civil wars and ethnic politics. Currently, he is working on a project that examines the wartime behaviors of belligerents from a specific reputational standpoint. His work involves a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, with a particular emphasis on applying Bayesian reasoning. yadiputera@ufl.edu
 

Elena Ashburn is a Political Science and International Studies undergraduate at the University of Florida with minors in Philosophy and Family, Youth, and Community Sciences. Currently, she serves as a Center for Undergraduate Research Ambassador and is a 2023-24 Junior Fellow in the Department of Political Science. As a Junior Fellow, she is working with Dr. Elischer studying military coups and post-coup electoral outcomes. Her research interests include global security and conflict, authoritarianism, terrorism, and the impacts of American military interventionism.
 

Muharrem (Mu) Bagriyanik is a PhD student in political science. His academic specialization encompasses political methodology as his primary field and comparative politics as his minor field. He is working on his dissertation, which focuses on Topological Data Analysis (TDA). His research seeks to expand the application of TDA within Political Science and further into various domains of social sciences. Mu has a keen interest in Machine, Learning, Deep Learning, Causal Inference, and Bayesian Statistics. As a Data Analyst Graduate Assistant in the Human Resources Department at the University of Florida, Mu has completed numerous projects utilizing Machine Learning and other advanced methodologies. mbagriyanik@ufl.edu
 

Tate Jones is a Political Science undergraduate at the University of Florida with a minor in European Union Studies. Currently, he serves as a Junior Fellow in the Department of Political Science, working with Professor David Siroky on a project investigating popular support for domestic militia groups in Eastern Europe. Additionally, his research interests include ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, private military contractor interaction in sub-Saharan Africa, and the political dynamics of the arms procurement industry.
 

Suren Mohammed is a first-year PhD student in Political Science at the University of Florida. Growing up in a conflict-ridden country and region characterized by various conflicts, from ethno-nationalist to sectarian, he has been interested in studying the causes and consequences of conflict and violence. His research interests center on the dynamics of ethnicity, secessionism, and nationalism, with a special focus on the empirical Kurdish conflict in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. He is interested in studying how ethno-nationalist movements think when pursuing secession. Additionally, his research interests extend to the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states in shaping regional conflict dynamics and how conflict in the region has impacted state capacity. suren.mohammed@ufl.edu
 

Dilruba Tas (she/her/hers) is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at University of Florida. Her research interests include gender and women’s studies, women’s political violence and participation in armed rebellion, and international security studies with a regional focus on the Middle East. dtas@ufl.edu