Headlines 2020

A new approach to studying religion and politics

Peter Dizikes MIT News

Associate Professor Richard Nielsen is an MIT political scientist with an innovative research program: He studies clerics in the Islamic world, combining textual analysis, ethnographic insights, on-the-ground research in the Middle East, and a big-data approach to charting online tracts.

For cultural and political conflicts, a humanizing imperative

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Nasir Almasri heard so many discussions about the political struggles of Palestinians that by the time he was 7, he thought he’d heard enough to last a lifetime. He was wrong.

Taking the pulse of local politics

Leda Zimmerman MIT Political Science

With research that captures and analyzes information from large databases, Magazinnik is revealing that local governance and execution of federal policies varies widely, and does not uniformly advance democratic norms.

Democracy in distress?

Peter Dizikes MIT News

Experts analyze a global trend: democratic governments that collapse from within while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.

3 questions with Fotini Christia, the new Chair of the Social & Engineering Systems PhD program

IDSS

Fotini Christia is a professor of political science and faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Her research interests deal with the political economy of conflict and development in the Muslim world and she has done extensive experimental, survey, and big data research on Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, and Yemen. In addition to chairing the Social & Engineering Systems PhD program, she directs the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) within IDSS.

A new world of warcraft

Leda Zimmerman MIT Political Science

Political scientist Erik Lin-Greenberg explores how a burgeoning high-tech arsenal is shaping military conflict.

3 Questions: Chappell Lawson on U.S. security policy

Peter Dizikes MIT News

The year 2020 has featured an array of safety and security concerns for ordinary Americans, including disease and natural disasters. How can the U.S. government best protect its citizens? That is the focus of a new scholarly book with practical aims, “Beyond 9/11: Homeland Security for the Twenty-First Century,” published by the MIT Press. The volume features chapters written by 19 security experts, and closely examines the role of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Why soldiers fight

Leda Zimmerman MIT Political Science

Political science graduate student Matthew Cancian brings his own military experience to bear on battlefield psychology

A champion of renewable energy

Hannah Meiseles MIT News

It’s an amazing moment when a topic learned in the classroom comes to life. For senior Darya Guettler, that moment came on a sweltering day while installing solar panels in low-income communities in Los Angeles, alongside workers who had been previously incarcerated.

Finding patterns in the noise

Leda Zimmerman MIT Political Science

Using novel computational approaches, graduate student Sean Liu develops better tools for analyzing data.