FORMER DOCTORAL RESEARCHERS

Genevieve Bates, Former Program Manager

Zikai Li, Former Assistant Program Manager

Sabreena Croteau, Research Assistant

Evgenia Olimpieva

Ji Xue

Genevieve Bates (PhD, University of Chicago) is an assistant professor of political science at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include political violence, human rights, 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 worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from January 2017 to August 2021 and 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 commissions on the quality of democracy, and work exploring the relationship between post-authoritarian purges and crime in young 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 [email protected].

Zikai Li is a PhD student in political science and MS student in statistics. His research interests lie in international and comparative political economy and applied research methodology. As a member of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, he was involved in coding country chronologies of transitional justice and compiling codings into count data. You can contact Zikai at [email protected].
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Sabreena Croteau is a predoctoral fellow at USC and a senior 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. 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. As a member of the Lab, Sabreena worked on collecting events for the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. You can contact Sabreena at [email protected].

​Evgenia Olimpieva (PhD, UChicago) is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in comparative politics and political methodology. Her research focuses on autocracies with an emphasis on the post-Soviet region. Her dissertation project deals with law enforcement agencies in Russia, their role in authoritarian regime consolidation and backsliding. In collaboration with Professor Monika Nalepa, Ipek Cinar and Genevieve Bates, she is currently working on the project that seeks to answer whether some types of transitional justice negatively impact young democracies by inadvertently increasing the levels of organized crime. Evgenia is also interested in the topic of collective memory and has written on the role of memory of the Great Patriotic War in the legitimation of Putin’s regime. Evgenia worked as part of the lab from 2015-2018, compiling event chronologies and collecting data on the fates of political elites. She has published in Nationalities Papers and Slavic Review. She has also contributed to the Washington Post's Monkey Cage Blog (link). You can read more about Evgenia here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Evgenia at [email protected].

​Ji Xue (PhD, UChicago) She specializes in formal theory and comparative politics. Ji's current research focuses on the concept of pivotality. She is working on two projects at the moment. The first project builds a new measure of policy stability based on preferences of political actors. The other project uses a lab experiment and survey to examine how people's sense of being pivotal affects public goods provision. Ji was involved with the lab in 2017 and 2018, when she coded transitional justice events for a variety of countries. You can contact Ji at [email protected].