Political Violence Lab Leadership
Andrew Shaver
Founding Director
Andrew is an assistant professor in political science at the University of California, Merced. He is an international relations scholar focused on the causes, consequences, and measurement of political violence globally with a particular focus on forcible displacement; the security consequences of a changing global climate; and how major international news media reporting (mis)shapes our understanding of these and related issues. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University's Political Science department; a lecturer in international relations at Dartmouth College and the Niehaus Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security in the College's John Sloan Dickey Center For International Understanding; and a predoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. In 2008/09, Andrew served as a U.S. Department of Defense civilian in Iraq, where he worked with a Pentagon task force that carried out economics-based counterinsurgency programs. He has served as well as a foreign affairs fellow in the U.S. Senate (2012) and as a staffer in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2009/10). Andrew holds a Ph.D. (Public Affairs), M.A. (Public Affairs), and M.P.A. (International Relations) from Princeton University and a B.S. (Economics, International Business) from Westminster College.