Justine Davis

Justine Maisha Davis is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) at the University of Michigan, where she will be an Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Political Science starting in the fall of 2022. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, was a UC presidential postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and holds a master’s degree from the American University of Paris and la Sorbonne-Paris I. Her research interests include electoral violence, civil society, and the challenges to democratization efforts in post-conflict settings and weakly institutionalized democracies. Her dissertation, “Wartime Experiences of Civic Leaders: Legacies of Civil War, Rebel Control, and Democratization in Post-Conflict Africa,” won the Western Political Science Association best dissertation award in 2020. She also won the Ralph Bunche Best Graduate Student Paper in 2018 Award from the African Politics Conference Group, an organized section of the American Political Science Association and the African Studies Association. Her research has been published in African Affairs, Party Politics, and the South African Geographical Journal.

Current Work:

Davis' research examines challenges to democratization efforts in post-conflict and weakly institutionalized contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her current book project explores how civil war affects the ability of local civil society organizations to contribute to post-conflict democratization. Through a multi-methods research design, she leverages geographic variation in rebel takeover in Côte d'Ivoire to examine how war shapes local civil society and citizens. She also has projects on preventing electoral violence in new democracies; the role of legislator behavior in party system stability; and how civic education campaigns can reduce support for violence in post-conflict settings. For more information, please visit her website.