who we are

Monika Nalepa, Director

Genevieve Bates, Program Manager

Ipek Cinar, Data Manager

Sabreena Croteau, Research Assistant

Viivi Järvi, Assistant Program Manager

Benjamin Konstan, Research Assistant

Ken Krmoyan, Research Assistant

Moksha Sharma, Research Assistant

Jordi Vasquez, Senior Research Assistant

Hani Warith, Research Assistant

Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Studies in Logic and Rhetoric, and Decyzje. Read more about Monika here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Professor Nalepa at mnalepa@uchicago.edu.

Genevieve Bates is a fifth-year PhD candidate in political science. Her research interests include political violence, post-conflict politics, transitional justice, and international criminal law. Her dissertation project focuses on the strategies domestic political actors use to address the prospect of International Criminal Court investigations during peace negotiations, and the implications of those negotiations for domestic justice processes. She joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in January 2017 and has contributed to the collection and coding of transitional justice data, as well as overall project organization and operations. She has several ongoing projects as part of the lab, including work identifying the causal effects of truth revelation procedures on the quality of democracy, and work identifying the causal effects of purges on crime in new democracies. She has published in Perspectives on Politics​. Read more about Genevieve here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Genevieve at genbates@uchicago.edu.

 Ipek Cinar is a second-year PhD student in political science. She studies comparative politics with a focus on comparative democratization, quantitative & computational methods, and their applications to political science research. She received a BA in economics and business from Koc University, Turkey (2016) and an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago (2018). She joined the lab in January 2017 and has been contributing to the coding as well as collection of transitional justice events for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. She has also been extensively involved in the creation of the web interface for the purpose of making a user friendly geo-coded mappings of the projects. She has published in Perspectives on Politics. She also has several ongoing projects as part of the lab, including work identifying the causal effects of transitional justice events on the quality of democracy, and work identifying the causal effects of purges on crime. Read more about Ipek here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Ipek at ipekcinar@uchicago.edu.

Sabreena Croteau is a second-year PhD student in political science, focusing on international relations and comparative politics. While she is more broadly interested in the political economy of international security, those interests have also drawn her towards looking at comparative regimes and transitions in the context of global politics and the international economy. She joined the lab in March 2019 and has been contributing to the collection of events for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. Her regional interests include the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the context of African regimes and transitions, she hopes to bring the data and ideas regarding transitional justice and democratic stabilization developed in the project into conversation with Phillip Roessler's work on the coup-civil war paradox. You can contact Sabreena at croteausa@uchicago.edu.

Viivi Järvi is a student in the Committee on International Relations Master's program; she graduated from the University of Chicago in June 2018 with a BA in political science and romance languages and literatures. She has worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab since Spring 2017, collecting data in particular on Northern and Southern European countries. As a comparativist, her regions of interest include Southern Europe and Latin America, and her substantive interests encompass questions on political violence and post-conflict justice. You can contact Viivi at viivi.jarvi@gmail.com.

Ben Konstan is a second-year undergraduate in the College, majoring in mathematics and economics. His academic interests span game theory, modeling, and statistics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in one of these fields. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab​ in June 2019 to work on formally modeling social welfare during periods of transitional justice. He will focus on deriving the theory behind social outcomes for these events. You can contact Ben at konstan@uchicago.edu.

Ken Krmoyan is a third-year undergraduate in the College, double majoring in political science and economics. Ken has broad interests in international relations, international political economy, transitional justice, and human rights, and he is currently thinking about pursuing a career in law. He joined the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab in September 2018 and has been contributing to the collection of events (e.g. purges, prosecutions, lustrations, trials) for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset project. Ken's geographic interests include post-Soviet countries and Eastern Europe generally, but he has also worked on Southern and Western Europe, as well as a few countries in Asia/Pacific. You can contact Ken at kkrmoyan@uchicago.edu.

Moksha Sharma is a third-year undergraduate in the College, majoring in political science and English. She is particularly interested in political philosophy, law, and rhetoric. She has been working for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab since June 2019 and started with the chronology of transitional justice in South Korea. You can contact Moksha at moksha@uchicago.edu.

Jordi Vasquez is a fourth-year undergraduate in the college, majoring in political science and minoring in history. He has been working as part of the lab since June of 2018. He is broadly interested in international relations, authoritarian regime elite survival, and international security. As part of the project, he has primarily worked on researching the fates of authoritarian elites for both interwar and post-World War II authoritarian regimes which transitioned to democracy, in addition to creating, merging, and analyzing datasets utilizing this data. He is currently working on a paper with Professor Nalepa on the relationship between de jure transitional justice policies and de facto authoritarian elite survival outcomes. You can contact Jordi at jordi.n.vasquez@gmail.com.

Hani Warith is a student in the Committee on International Relations master’s degree program specializing in regional studies and international security. He is primarily interested in comparative politics focusing on regime transitions, transitional justice, and political behavior. Hani joined the lab in May 2019 and has been most heavily involved in collecting data on transitional justice as it relates to the Middle East. In addition to the MENA region, his regional focus further encompasses South Asia. Hani is currently working on a master's thesis on majoritarian protest in consociational democracies, combining quantitative analysis with case-study research of Iraq, Lebanon and Bosnia. You can contact Hani at hwarith@uchicago.edu.