Aditi Malik

Biography

Aditi Malik’s scholarship focuses on the study of political violence, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and social movements and contentious politics in Africa and South Asia. She leverages multi-method techniques, combining insights from cross-regional, multi-sited fieldwork with analyses of quantitative conflict datasets to shine a light on the drivers of political violence and contentious political action. To date, Malik has conducted fieldwork on these topics in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Nepal.

Her first book, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge University Press 2024), develops a theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between elites, political parties, and party-based violence. This research is based on a cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India with subnational comparisons in the two countries. The book relies on a host of qualitative and quantitative data to account for the conditions under which political parties can become instruments for conflict. 

Malik is now working on her second book, tentatively entitled, The Politics of Anti-Rape Mobilization: How Constructions of Victimhood Shape Public Protests against Sexual Violence in India and South Africa. This book develops a unified framework about the making of “good victims,” and shows how differential constructions of victimhood interface with structural factors and dynamic forces to produce highly uneven public responses to lethal incidents of rape in India and South Africa. Drawing on evidence from in-depth qualitative interviews, participant observation techniques, and descriptive analyses of original and existing quantitative datasets, The Politics of Anti-Rape Mobilization accounts not only for variations in the emergence of anti-rape protests, but also for notable and observable differences in their pace and duration. To date, this project has received generous support from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the International Peace Research Association Foundation (IPRAF), and the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies (ICAS) in New Delhi, where Malik served as a residential fellow in Spring 2026. An article version of the book’s arguments also received the Best Paper on Intersectionality Award from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of APSA in 2025. 

In addition to her book, Malik’s academic articles have appeared in journals such as Civil Wars; PS: Political Science & Politics; Commonwealth & Comparative Politics; Politics, Groups, and Identities; African Studies Review; African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review; India Review; Human Rights Review; and Human Rights Quarterly, among others. She has also conducted policy analysis for the World Bank and the United Nations, and her public-facing writing and commentary has appeared in outlets such as The Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post; The Conversation (Africa); and Deutsche Welle.

Aditi Malik earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University, her MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (where she studied as a Gates Cambridge scholar), and her B.A. with honors in Government and Economics from Franklin & Marshall College. Prior to arriving at Holy Cross, she served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Africana Research Center at Penn State University.