Peter Krause
Associate Professor of Political Science, Boston College
Research Affiliate, MIT Security Studies Program
The Political Violence Project
The Political Violence Project was founded in the fall of 2013. The Project Team consists of graduate and undergraduate students from Boston College and neighboring schools who conduct research on the Middle East and North Africa, U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, and terrorism and political violence under the guidance of Professor Krause. Team members develop and utilize research skills including archival work, survey analysis, media creation, and content analysis in a dynamic, cooperative environment. Team members have contributed to a number of publications in a variety of scholarly and popular outlets. The research team resets each spring, summer, and fall semester, and we are always looking for new, motivated members. Contact Professor Krause if you are interested in joining The Project.
The Project Team, Spring/Summer 2024
Current Projects
To Which Victor Go the Spoils? Predicting "The Day After" Regimes Change
A growing amount of research has analyzed when national movements and insurgents overthrow the existing government, but which groups within those movements and insurgencies actually come to power after regime change, and why? We are finalizing the construction of a massive dataset that will help us answer these questions. This project will become an academic book. In the meantime, we published a post at Political Violence @ a Glance applying our research on insurgencies to explain and predict dynamics and outcomes in Game of Thrones.
What happened to moderates in America?
Amid rising polarization, political moderates are (seemingly) on the decline in the U.S. What factors led to their downfall? Can moderates help stem the tide of polarization and political violence in the U.S.? And just who is a "moderate," anyway? We analyze these and other issues in a new book project over a decade in the making.
Teaching research skills to Boston College students
The Political Violence Project provides hands-on training in research skills to all of its members. We want to bring that training to all BC students, so we are creating a series of online training modules focused on research skills like asking good questions, generating quality arguments and research designs, and handling bias and ethics. The modules themselves will be engaging and hands-on: focused not on long lectures, but rather short, engaging videos of faculty, students, and alumni discussing how they build and utilize certain skills, coupled with a variety of short readings and practice tasks to train students in methods they use in research projects for all of their classes. We are creating the modules now and look forward to making them available to the BC community over the next year.
The Impact of Education on Attitudes About Terrorism
(with Liane Young, Betül Özturan, Jordan Theriault, and Daniel Gustafson)
Survey experiments on the impact of in-person and online college courses on student attitudes concerning the definition, causes, strategies, and effects of terrorism, as well as how knowledge impacts threat assessment and preferred counterterrorism strategies. We have published two academic journals articles on this project and are working on a third.
Stories From the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science
(with Ora Szekely)