Jessica Stanton, Associate Professor, Political Science
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My interest in civil war violence began in college. In 1998, I studied abroad in Senegal hoping to better understand sustainable development efforts. But in West Africa at the time, much of the conversation concerned the recent civil war in Liberia, the ongoing conflict in Sierra Leone, and international criminal accountability for the Rwandan genocide. Upon my return to the United States, I redirected my academic focus to issues related to civil conflict, international intervention, and post-conflict reconstruction.
In my research, I seek to generate nuanced understandings of large-scale violence, and insights that aid in preventing wartime atrocities, strengthening the enforcement of international human rights and humanitarian law, ending conflicts, and establishing peace after civil war. In many armed conflicts, armed forces intentionally target civilian populations. In my book, Violence and Restraint in Civil War (2016), I analyze why some governments and rebel groups deliberately attack civilians during civil war, while other groups do not. I show that some groups exercise deliberate restraint toward civilians and respect international humanitarian law in order to win support from domestic and international audiences. The book draws on statistical analyses of violence in more than 100 civil wars that took place in countries around the world from 1989 to 2010 and on interviews in Indonesia and Uganda. Currently, I am examining the global spread of laws criminalizing terrorism and the, at times, perverse impacts that these laws have on human rights.
For more information, click here.
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FEATURED PUBLICATION
Janire Zalbidea, Cristina Sanz
Prof. Janire Zalbidea explains the importance of her work:
Acquiring a foreign language in adulthood is becoming increasingly common and has numerous benefits, including advantages in professional advancement. However, language learning is a highly complex endeavor characterized by many individual differences in both the rate and outcome of leaning. The rise of technology in education has also highlighted the need to understand the affordances and demands of self-directed language learning in computer-assisted environments. This research examines how different memory aptitudes predict college-age students' successful development of Spanish morphosyntax under different computerized task conditions. It also explores the connections between different memory aptitudes and students' perceptions of how much mental effort an instructional task requires and how difficult they find the task to be. With implications for language learning theory, research findings shed light on the mental processes underlying the initial stages of learning a foreign language and the cognitive demands posed by different types of instructional components. Study outcomes are also informative for language teaching, as they provide insights that can optimize the efficacy of foreign language instruction in computerized environments in support of more individualized pedagogy.
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AWARD OF THE MONTH
Additional information is available here and also here.
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