Erica Chenoweth (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. She also directs Wesleyan’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, which she established in 2008. Chenoweth is an Associate at the International Security Program at the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She is co-editor (with Adria Lawrence of Yale) of Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict, which will be published in 2010 by MIT Press.

Chenoweth’s research interests include terrorism, the outcomes of nonviolent and violent protest, the consequences of political violence, democratization, and repression. Chenoweth’s doctoral dissertation investigates the reasons why non-state actors resort to violence in democracies despite the availability of legal methods of protest. In another project, she and co-author Maria Stephan research the conditions under which nonviolent resistance methods are more effective than violent methods in achieving strategic goals such as regime change, expelling foreign occupiers, or achieving self-determination. Chenoweth is also co-lead investigator (with Laura Dugan) on a project that assesses the efficacy of different counterterrorism policies in the Middle East since 1980.