Aditi Malik, Ph.D.
amalik@holycross.edu
Associate Professor
College of the Holy Cross
Year of PhD: 2015
Country: United States (Massachusetts)
About Me:
Aditi Malik is Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. She earned her PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. Aditi studies Comparative Politics with regional specializations in Africa and South Asia. Her substantive interests include the study of political violence, gender-based violence, and social movements and contentious politics. She is also interested in the philosophy of social science and in small-N cross-regional comparisons. Aditi has conducted fieldwork on various facets of conflict and conflict resolution in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Nepal. Her academic work has appeared in venues such as Human Rights Review; Human Rights Quarterly; African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review; Commonwealth & Comparative Politics; Politics, Groups, and Identities; African Studies Review; India Review; and Zed Books. She has also conducted policy analysis for the World Bank and the United Nations, and her writing and analyses have appeared in public-facing outlets such as the Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post, The Conversation (Africa), and Deutsche Welle. Aditi's first book, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.
Research Interests
Political Violence
Sexual Violence
Elections
Social Movements
African Politics
South Asian Politics
Cross-Regional Comparisons
Countries of Interest
Kenya
India
South Africa
Nepal
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world. The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced. Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how. Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production. Building on feminist standpoint theory, this article shows how relations of power and inequality within research sites can work alongside a researcher’s position to create methodological impasses for scholars of sexual violence. Drawing on experiences of fieldwork in India, we describe two methodological impasses: interrogation and silence. We also offer recommendations for navigating these challenges in the field.
Why do communal provocations generate violence in some moments but not in others? Drawing on 52 interviews and archival and ethnographic evidence from Bhagalpur, Bihar, we develop a theoretical framework to explain how communal conflict might be controlled. In Bhagalpur, we find that a state-society partnership has helped the city to avoid active violence since 1989. Civil society elites gain and maintain local followings by drawing on their access to the state to resolve quotidian problems for their constituents. Doing so cements their status in their communities and imbues them with the credibility to calm communal tensions. These findings illuminate the governance strategies through which state actors might delegate the performance of important state functions, such as maintaining order, to non-state groups. They also reveal a range of tactics through which state-society partnerships might thwart communal conflict in divided societies like India.
What factors explain the recent rise of Hindu–Muslim violence in rural India? Using the 2013 communal riots that broke out in Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts as a theory-building case, this article advances two arguments to account for this important development. First, it holds that these clashes must be understood against the backdrop of the high-stakes 2014 general elections, which generated incentives for several national and regional parties to use conflict as a means to win votes. Second, the paper demonstrates that politicians chose to strategically instrumentalize violence among rural—rather than urban—communities because of the lower likelihood of backlash expected from rural voters. In contrast to urban voters, who have repeatedly experienced such clashes and who have developed a willingness to punish violence-wielding politicians, rural voters' relative lack of exposure to communal riots made them both more easily mobilizable and less likely to sanction elites in 2013. Qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, official government records, and newspaper reports from two rural (Muzaffarnagar and Shamli) and one urban district (Meerut) in Uttar Pradesh as well as New Delhi provide support for these arguments.
Existing research on electoral violence has largely proposed either top-down (elite) or bottom-up (mass) explanations for such conflict. Consequently, scholars have scarcely considered how elites’ tactics interact with the interests of citizens on the ground. This article proposes an issue-framing approach to fill the above gap. Drawing on over 140 original interviews conducted with elites and vernacular radio listeners in Kenya, we identify three emphasis frames – political marginalisation, victimisation, and foreign occupation – that found resonance with certain groups of Kenyan voters in 2007–2008. Specifically, we show that divisive messages – disseminated through ethnic radios – resonated among those communities for whom institutional or material factors had already provided reasons to fight. These findings from the Kenyan case suggest that in giving rise to election-related conflict, incendiary media messaging is likely to inform the choices of those groups who are predisposed towards violence.
In places prone to electoral violence, what effects can constitutional changes have on elites’ incentives to organise conflict? This article develops two hypotheses to address the above question. It proposes that in places where national reforms find sub-national resonance, national and local politicians’ incentives regarding the electoral utility of conflict will align. However, in places where national-level changes fail to be locally relevant, these incentives will deviate from one another. The research illustrates these logics through a controlled comparison of two Kenyan counties: one that experienced electoral violence and the other that maintained peace around the 2013 elections.
Since the restoration of multiparty political competition, Kenya has witnessed three violent elections. However, the 2013 presidential election concluded relatively peacefully and the winning Jubilee Coalition succeeded in uniting the “historically rival” Kikuyu and Kalenjin communities behind its banner. What factors explain these notable developments? Drawing on original interviews with elites as well as relevant secondary sources, this article shows that the birth of a Kikuyu-Kalenjin coalition and the lack of violence in 2013 were not due to Kenyan elites' commitments to peace. Rather, politicians steered clear of instrumentalizing violence because new institutional arrangements prevented them from doing so. The research also demonstrates that the leaders of Jubilee—Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto—strategically made use of the International Criminal Court indictments against them to consolidate Kikuyu and Kalenjin support behind their coalition. As such, this study shows how international legal interventions can be tactically recast to pursue domestic political ends.
Books Written:
Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India, Playing with Fire develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, it shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters' future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence. By centering political parties as key actors in the production of conflict, and bringing together evidence from both Africa and South Asia, Playing with Fire contributes new insights to the study of political violence.
Book Chapters:
This chapter uses a no-variance design and case studies of three Kenyan counties to demonstrate how the implementation of devolution can open up new opportunities for elites to organize political conflict.