Adria Lawrence

ADRIA LAWRENCE is the Aronson Distinguished Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in International Studies from Vassar College.

Lawrence is a scholar of Middle Eastern and North African Politics. She studies colonialism, nationalism, conflict, and collective action. Her 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. Her recent article in the British Journal of Political Science shows how past experiences of regime repression shape the willingness of people to initiate protest against an authoritarian regime. She is also writing a book on colonial state formation, which investigates the tactics used by the British and French to establish their empires in Africa and the Middle East.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Project 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.