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Welcome.  I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia where I am also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for International Trade and Security and the African Studies Institute. During Fall 2022 I was a Visiting Scholar with the Elections, Violence, and Parties Project at the University of Amsterdam. Previously I was a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (2021-2022).

I study political order and violence with a focus in Sub-Saharan Africa.  My book project, Political Order and Election Violence in Nigeria, explains the scale of election violence by paying close attention how and why violence is jointly organized by politicians and different groups.  In other work, I study armed groups and their relationships with citizens and governments, election violence and political participation, community mobilization against electoral manipulation and violence, and democratic backsliding.

My research has been published in International Security, Studies in Comparative International Development, Political Science Quarterly, and World Development. It has been generously supported by the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Watson Institute for  International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University  in 2017 and am an alumna of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Development where I was a National Science Foundation-IGERT Doctoral Fellow.

For more information, please click on the links above. To get in touch with me, please email me at: megan.turnbull@uga.edu.