Biography
Konstantin Ash (Ph.D. University of California – San Diego) is an assistant professor in the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, specializing in comparative politics and international relations. Specifically, he focuses on explaining participation in political conflict and violence, ranging from protests and riots to insurgencies and terrorism and using these findings to make group-level quantitative inferences, particularly with respect to conflict in the Middle East, North Africa and the broader Islamic World. His published work, which appears in International Interactions and Democratization, among other journals, has focused on explaining fragmentation in political protest movements in competitive autocracies and the rationale for the formation of pro-government militias. Other research, either under peer review or in progress, focuses on explaining allegiance patterns among identity groups at the outset of civil conflicts, explaining demands for regime change in the Arab World, elucidating the relationship between drought and the onset of the Syrian Civil War and explaining the use of terrorism by insurgent groups.
