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Welcome. I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. I am also a Faculty Affiliate with the Benson-Bertsch Center for International Trade and Security and the African Studies Institute.

I am currently a Distinguished Scholar with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. I was previously a Visiting Scholar with the Elections, Violence, and Parties Project at the University of Amsterdam (Fall 2022) and a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (2021-2022).

I broadly study threats to democratic governance. My book, Organizing Election Violence: Politicians and Armed Groups in Nigeria, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and will be included in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series. The book explains when lethal election-related violence is likely to be selective or indiscriminate by paying close attention to the joint production of election violence by politicians and different types of armed groups. In other work, I study armed groups and their relationships with citizens and governments, the legitimacy of state and non-state armed actors, partisan animosity and polarization, how election violence influences political attitudes and participation, citizens’ views on when and why political violence is justified, and when and why citizens willingly participate in different forms of political violence in backsliding democracies.

My research has been published in different outlets, including African Affairs, International Security, Journal of Peace Research, Political Behavior, and World Development. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University  in 2017 where I was a National Science Foundation-IGERT Doctoral Fellow.

For more information, please click on the links above. To get in touch with me, please email me at: megan.turnbull@uga.edu.