LAB ALUMNI

Sabreena Croteau

Evgenia Olimpieva

Viivi Järvi

Ojashwi Sapkota

Jordi Vasquez

Hani Warith

Ji Xue

Sabreena Croteau is a third-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. 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 croteausa@uchicago.edu.

​Evgenia Olimpieva is a fifth-year PhD student in political science, 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 eolimpieva@uchicago.edu.

Viivi Järvi is a first-year PhD student in the politics department at Princeton University and a former 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 worked for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab from 2017-2020, 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.

Ojashwi Sapkota graduated in 2020 from the Master of Arts Program in Social Science. Her concentration was in political science. While working for the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, she collected and coded data on criminal trials. Her regions of interest include South Asia, and her substantive interests encompass human rights, international organizations, and post-conflict transitional justice. 

Jordi Vasquez is a recent graduate from the College. He majored in political science and minored in history. He worked as part of the lab from June of 2018 until December of 2020. He is broadly interested in international relations, authoritarian regime elite survival, and international security. As part of the project, he 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 first-year PhD student in the politics department at Princeton University and a former student in the Committee on International Relations Master's program. He is primarily interested in comparative politics focusing on regime transitions, transitional justice, and political behavior. Hani was a member of the lab in 2019 and 2020. As a member of the lab, he was most heavily involved in collecting data on transitional justice as it relates to the Middle East and South Asia. Hani's master's thesis focused 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.

​Ji Xue is a sixth-year PhD candidate in political science. 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 jixue@uchicago.edu.