Aila Matanock

Aila Matanock is a member of the Executive Committee for the IGCC Future of Democracy initiative, and an Associate Professor of political science at UC Berkeley. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in her work on fragile states and the influence of third parties: international actors and civilians.

Matanock has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, the Pacific, Côte d’Ivoire, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from the National Science Foundation, the Minerva Research Initiative, IGCC, and the Center for Global Development, among others. Her first book, Electing Peace: Credibly Transitioning from Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association.

Her forthcoming publications include: “How International Actors Help Enforce Domestic Deals” (Annual Review of Political Science); “Third-Party Policymakers and the Limits of the Influence of Indicators,” in The Power of Global Performance Indicators (Cambridge University Press); and “Living in Fear: The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” (Comparative Political Studies).

Matanock was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2015–2016), a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California San Diego (2012–2013), and a predoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (2010–2012).She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University.