Melissa Pavlik

Melissa Pavlik is an Assistant Professor in Political Economy and Political Science at Tulane University and The Murphy Institute, where she contributes to interdisciplinary research and teaches courses in the Undergraduate Program in Political Economy. Her research focuses on informality and repression. Before graduate school, Mel spent years mapping and analyzing data on political violence for NGOs, conflict observatories, and think tanks, including most recently at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Her analysis has been published across a wide variety of outlets, including The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, World Politics Review, and Foreign Policy.

Her academic work addresses the political economy and geography of informality, the consequences of attempts to address climate change, and micro-dynamics of repression and political violence, especially in West Africa. She also works on issues of causal inference and measurement, particularly data missingness and the use of geospatial data and networks. Her dissertation project focuses on how states use uneven enforcement patterns to ‘produce precarity’ among populations displaced by conflict and climate change, fostering their exploitation by powerful non-state allies. This project features insight from fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria. Professor Pavlik received her PhD from Yale University.