Affiliates
Senior Research Affiliate: Htike Htike
Htike Htike holds a Master's degree in MSc, “The Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice” at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London. Htike has been involved in the investigations of serious international crimes, human rights violations, state propaganda, hate speech movement, and exploitation of labour in the garment and fishing industries.
Htike has also contributed to youth education projects, community development projects and humanitarian support for local communities, refugees, detainees and internally displaced people with United Nations, International Organizations and Community-based Organizations in Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh and Indonesia,
Htike’s area of research included political violence, international justice, state crimes, transnational crime, the connection between conflict and infrastructure, and the correlation among illicit drugs, wars/ethnic armed conflict and slow violence.
Postdoctoral Research Affiliate: Emily Myers
Emily Myers directs the research program at the Voter Formation Project and am a post-doctoral research affilate at ETH Zürich. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Duke University. Previously, Emily was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar, and a Junior Visiting Scholar at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.
Emily study violence, political participation, and gender, with a geographic focus on Nepal. Her work has been published or is forthcoming at World Development, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Civil Wars.
Prior to beginning a graduate degree, Emily was a Research Associate at the National Endowment for Democracy and a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Outside of her research, Emily loves to hike with her dog, ski, and bike.
Publications
Myers, Emily. “Insurgent Conscription for Capacity and Control: State Violence and Coerced Recruitment in Civil War.” Forthcoming. Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Myers, Emily. “Gendered Governance: How Women in Insurgent Government Shape Rebel Rule.” Forthcoming. Civil Wars.
Myers, Emily, Audrey Sacks, Juan Tellez, and Erik Wibbels. “Forced Displacement, Social Cohesion, and the State: Evidence From Eight New Studies.” World Development 173 (2024).
Graduate Research Affiliate: Christy Coulsen
Christy is a graduate research affiliate with the IRDS and an ESRC-funded second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previously, Christy occupied research assistantship roles at the University of Oxford’s DPIR and LSE’s Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC). Christy holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Exeter (2016), an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Governance from the University of Amsterdam (2017) and an MSc in Applied Social Data Science from LSE (2023).
Christy is a social data and political scientist. His research focuses on the application of non-parametric machine learning methods to inference and explanation tasks in political science. He is specifically interested in the tension between explanation, inference, and prediction in the context of ML strategies and seeks to understand how we can leverage the predictive fidelity of advanced ML while maintaining the explanatory and inferential qualities of traditional parametric methods. He is also interested in applying these methods in quasi-experimental settings. Substantively, Christy’s research currently focuses on predicting and explaining conflict, understanding protest dynamics, armed group strategy, and political communication.
In addition to academia, Christy has spent several years in the data science and advanced analytics practices across a variety of industries, from capital markets to intellectual property.
Publication
Coulson, C., “Using Shapley Values to Generate Theories in Political Science.”, 2025.
Work in Progress
Schubiger, L., Myers, E., de Marchi, S., Dorsey, S., Coulson, C. “Mobilization for Equality: Norm Change and Backlash.” Working paper, 2025.