Justine Davis, Ph.D., is an LSA Collegiate Fellow and will be an Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Political Science starting in the Fall of 2022. The primary focus of her research is on democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. She also currently has a number of projects going on, including a book project and a project aimed at providing greater protection for research teams in Côte d'Ivoire and other places around the world.
Lily Cesario
Hi Justine, congratulations on your new position as an LSA Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor! Specific to these new roles, is there anything you are looking forward to in the upcoming school year?
Justine Davis
Specific to those roles? I mean, I guess I’m looking forward to, yeah, just working on some projects. What’s nice about the collegiate fellowship is that I just have to teach one course this year, so I have a lot of time to focus on research, which is really great.
Cesario
That sounds exciting! So with the course you’re teaching, Political Violence in Africa, what inspired you to teach it and what do you hope your students get out of it?
Davis
Yeah, so the motivation, I guess, and what I hope that students get out of it is that, you know, we often think about Africa –– we’re exposed to narratives about Africa being kind of this violent place. We know that there’s civil war, genocide –– we also think of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo –– but the goal of the course is to understand that Africa isn’t a violent place. It’s just that there are social and political conditions that allow for political violence in Africa. So the course aims to look at historical, political, and social conditions that explain violence in Africa, but also to look at contemporary cases of violence and try to understand the context in which this violence is happening. And so, we cover political violence in general, from the state using violence against its people, to genocide, to civil war, to election-related violence and terrorism.
Cesario
It sounds like a valuable course. How is it going so far now that we are three weeks into the semester?
Davis
I think it’s going well! I taught this course last semester as well, but it was on zoom. I definitely think that it feels better than last semester to the extent that, like, you know, when you see people face-to-face, you can gauge their interest more. I think people feel like they want to participate more than on Zoom when you can kinda fade into the background. So, I think that it’s going really well.
Something that I like to incorporate throughout the course is music from Africa that is about political violence. So, at the beginning of each course, we play a music video and we talk about the country context where the music comes from, but also how they’re talking about political violence, who they’re attributing the violence to. And I think students like that aspect of it. So yeah, that’s going well.
Cesario
That sounds like a great way to learn. Are you teaching this course next semester as well?
Davis
So next semester, because of the postdoc –– the fellowship –– I only have to teach once this year, so this is the one time I’ll be teaching it, but I hope to continue teaching it in the future.
Cesario
As far as your postdoc, is there anything specific you’re focusing on?
Davis
So it’s pretty open. The postdoc is supposed to be, yeah, just trying to do research, writing up stuff that’s already been conducted, and publishing it, which is (laughs), you know, the whole job. So, yeah, I’m working on the book project and I’m working on a paper that’s coming from the book project. I have a number of co-author projects that I’m working on, and I have some projects with UROP students here at Michigan, so I have a lot of projects going on (laughs). But I’m trying to get data collected or data analyzed or starting to write up stuff, so that has various stages.
Cesario
It sounds like a lot is happening. I know that you have a specific research interest in sub-Saharan Africa and democratization. Is that also included in your current work?
Davis
I would say that’s kind of like the broad theme of my research agenda: to better understand challenges to democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. So that’s the broad theme. And then I have some sub-themes within that, which includes the book project, but also I have projects on election violence. I have projects in Zambia on politician networks and how women are able to access those networks or not. So I have a number of projects that kind of fit into that broader theme.
Cesario
Okay, wow. What is it that brought you to this research on democratization in sub-Saharan Africa?
Davis
So that’s a good question. I think I’ve always been interested in political processes and my Ph.D. is in political science and I started investigating democracy-building, i.e., using international aid to build democracies abroad.
When I was in undergrad, I think I kind of got really interested in, how do we do this? How do we promote democracies in countries that have never experienced democracy before? Right? And are there ways we aren’t considering that could deter or inhibit that process?
So looking at election violence, where elections are good for democracy, generally, we tend to think that, right? But what happens when those elections turn violent? How does that affect the ability of a country to move forward in the democratization process? How does it affect the ability of local organizations to promote democracy amongst the population? How does it affect the ability of the population to want to participate in democracy? They think, “oh, elections are violent. Elections equal democracy. I don’t want to participate in democracy.” So, those are some of the broad questions that kind of motivate my research and what I investigate.
Cesario
And has that research question changed since you’ve gotten more into research, or has it stayed pretty much the same?
Davis
I would say the broad strokes are the same. Generally being interested in democratization, I would say individual projects kind of move the question in different directions. I think realizing what you can actually study or how you can actually study these questions, that’s what happens in grad school. I learned how to ask questions and then be able to answer them. I think it’s hard to answer a big question like, how do you get democracy? Like that’s a big question! But there are smaller questions that you can actually ask and answer in the course of a project.
Cesario
Okay, I see. So based on that, where do you see your research going in the future?
Davis
So that’s a great question because I think I’m still working on the current stuff. I’m starting to get more and more interested in the role of social media in election violence. I have a project right now with UROP students on how people are using social media to talk about election violence. So maybe that’s one direction I might go in is just thinking about how young people, in particular, are using these platforms to talk about democracy and if there’s violence around elections, how that’s shaping how they talk about democracy.
Cesario
That sounds really interesting.
Then, moving on to your book project, congratulations on winning the Best Dissertation Award from the Western Political Science Association last year! So your book is called “Uncivil Legacies: Wartime Rebel Control in Civil Society in Africa.” Can you tell me more about your book and how that’s going?
Davis
Yeah, so the book is going to be an expansion of my dissertation project, which is part of this bigger research agenda about democratization in post-conflict settings. So, I look at a specific actor, which is local, non-governmental organization leaders. These organizations get a ton of money from international actors to promote democracy in their communities. So these are like organizations that go out and they do like, peacebuilding and they do voter registration. And they do other activities like development-related activities with the goal of promoting social cohesion, right? In these post-conflict settings. And yet, they’re sort of very important actors. But they’re often overlooked. They're often not discussed in research about democratization.
And the book project’s goal is to intervene in this literature and say, okay, these are folks that have a lot of resources and a lot of power to affect democratization in these communities. Let’s look at them specifically and see what they’re doing and how they, themselves, have been affected by the war. And so the book looks at how these folks have been shaped by their own war experiences and how that affects their ability to promote democracy and encourage citizen participation with democracy.
One of my main cases is Ivory Coast, or Côte d'Ivoire, which is in West Africa and experienced a civil war from 2002-2011. And during that time period, the rebels were trying to take over the government, control half of the country, the northern half of the country. And then, the government controlled the southern half. And so I kind of used that difference: the fact that one part of the country was controlled by rebels when the other part was not to look at whether people behaved differently –– if they were under rebel control or if they were under government control. And I specifically looked at these actors who run these organizations. And what I find is that those organization leaders who lived under rebel control are more likely to keep the money for themselves, like keep the aid for themselves, and less likely to, when they do share, to share with groups that are different from their own.
And this is a coping mechanism, right? You know, when you live under uncertainty, like rebel control, you try to protect yourself and your family and your community. But what I can show is that this actually holds out even after the war is over. So during the war, they behaved this way. And then after the war, they behaved this way. And that has implications in how they will interact with the citizens that they’re trying to encourage to participate in democracy, i.e., if they’re only helping one group or if they’re excluding other groups or if they’re not actually helping or if they’re keeping all the money. And that can have detrimental effects on their ability to promote democracy in those conflict settings.
Cesario
Wow. It sounds like a great read.
Are there any other projects that you are working on that you want to highlight today?
Davis
Yeah, I have a lot.
Cesario
Do you have a favorite project?
Davis
Yeah, I have a favorite one that I’m working on right now.
So I do a lot of survey work –– so surveys, survey experiments. And to do those kinds of projects, you need to hire a local team to collect the data, to do the surveys for you, right? So everyone does this. This is, you know, what you do, right? But what often doesn’t happen is we don’t know the experiences of the people you hire. So there are the enumerators –– the people who are collecting these surveys for you. We get the responses. We get the data of the people who are being surveyed. And that’s typically what we care the most about. But, what about the people who collect the data? What are their experiences collecting this data?
So I’m working on a project with a co-author where we actually focus on those people, the enumerators, the research assistants, and we ask them about challenges they face while collecting data, in violent contexts in particular. And we focus in Côte d'Ivoire on enumerators that have collected data for a variety of different types of projects, how they face challenges, who challenges them, and what ultimately happens when they try to collect this information. And what we found is that enumerators that have faced violence, like actual violence while they were collecting data –– either they were followed, threatened, or harassed and in some extremes actually detained while they were trying to do this work or they witnessed violence so they saw violent protests or they saw someone getting beat up or something like that –– we had over 50% of the sample had experienced this violence. Which is really high. And as researchers, we don’t know this, we don't know that that’s what happens when we’re collecting this data. We assume that the respondents are just giving information and we don’t know that the enumerators face this violence. And so we looked at whether this violence shapes the challenges that they face and whether it affects the data that they’re able to collect.
What we found is that they’re more likely to face challenges from, you know, being exposed to violence –– also associated with facing challenges from local people. The respondents themselves will sometimes threaten the enumerators so that they face these challenges on a regular basis. And it affects their ability to collect data. So often, what they’ll do is skip households, so if they feel threatened, they won’t interview that household. And that has impacts on our data, right? So if I sent an enumerator out to interview household A and they don’t do it, they do household B instead, that can shape the data. ’Cause they’re not skipping that household, randomly, right? So we found that they actually have these kinds of solutions that they implement that could actually have an impact on data quality. But even more importantly, we really need to care about the safety of these enumerators. We need to find out what challenges they’re faced with and mitigate them so that they aren't feeling unsafe when they do the work that we’re getting them to do.
And so that’s a project that I feel very passionate about because I think that, as researchers, sometimes our ethics focus on the respondent. Like, don’t traumatize the respondent. Make sure the respondent feels safe. Make sure that the respondent’s getting good answers to the questions. And we kind of see the enumerator as this neutral vector to bring us information. And actually, they have life experiences too that we need to make sure that we understand if we’re going to employ them to do this work for us.
Cesario
That sounds so important. And that is in Côte d'Ivoire?
Davis
Yeah, we focus there. But we actually have plans to expand to other countries now that we’ve kind of collected this data in different contexts if we find similar results.
