Aditi Malik

Biography

My scholarship is focused on the study of political violence, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and social movements and contentious politics in Africa and South Asia. I am a mixed-methods researcher: my work combines insights from in-depth, multi-sited fieldwork with descriptive analyses of quantitative conflict datasets. Through these approaches, I seek to uncover both broad patterns of violence and trace the causal mechanisms that generate conflict and collective action. I am also interested in the philosophy of social science and in small-N cross-regional comparisons.

My 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.

I am now working on my second book, tentatively entitled, Social Location and Protest Politics: The Logics of Anti-Rape Mobilization in India and South Africa. This book proposes a new theory about how social location conditions the prospects for public demonstrations against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). It studies the making of such protests by leveraging notable variation in ordinary citizens' responses to lethal incidents of rape in India and South Africa. Combining insights from multi-sited fieldwork across the two countries—including in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation techniques—with descriptive analyses of original and existing quantitative datasets, the book shows how victims' social location influences not only the extent but also the pace of anti-rape protests in unequal and stratified societies. 

Research for Social Location and Protest Politics has received generous support from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, and the International Peace Research Association Foundation (IPRAF). The project has also been selected for funding from the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies (ICAS) in New Delhi where I will be based as a Senior Fellow in Spring 2026 to complete the manuscript. Finally, an article version of the book's arguments received the Best Paper on Intersectionality Award from the Women, Gender, and Politics Section of APSA (2025).

To date, my research has taken me to Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Nepal where I have studied various facets of conflict and conflict resolution. My 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, among others. In addition, I have conducted policy analysis for the World Bank and the United Nations, and my writing and analyses have also appeared in public-facing outlets such as The Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post; The Conversation (Africa); and Deutsche Welle.  

I frequently involve Holy Cross students in my research as Research Associates, so please do reach out if assisting in my work is of interest to you. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University, my MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (where I studied as a Gates Cambridge scholar), and my B.A. in Government and Economics from Franklin & Marshall College (where I graduated as Valedictorian). Prior to arriving at Holy Cross, I served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Africana Research Center at Penn State University.