Home

 Adria Lawrence is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Area Studies at Yale University. She studies colonialism, nationalism, conflict and collective action.  Her research reflects her expertise in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Lawrence’s book, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge University Press 2013), has received multiple awards, including the 2015 David Greenstone Book Prize, given by the American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section, the 2015 L. Carl Brown Book Prize, given by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), and the 2014 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award, given by the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on International History and Politics. It was named one of the best books of 2013 on Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel.

Lawrence has also investigated the use of violent and peaceful tactics by nationalist movements.  Her articles on this topic have appeared in International Security, as well as in Rethinking Violence: States and Non State Actors in Conflict (co-edited with Erica Chenoweth, MIT Press, 2010).

Her current research examines protest during the Arab Spring, analyzing how protest is initiated and why protest goals varied across cases.  This work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science.  Lawrence is also engaged in a book project that investigates how foreign powers rule, studying the meaning of direct and indirect rule in practice in colonial Algeria and beyond.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Project on on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Vassar College.