Sarah Zukerman Daly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at MIT where she was awarded the Lucian Pye Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Science, and she holds a M.Sc. (Distinction) in Development Studies from London School of Economics and B.A. (Honors, Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa) in International Relations from Stanford University. She has been a visiting associate research scholar in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, and a post-doctoral fellow in the Political Science Department and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Kroc Institute for International Peace at the University of Notre Dame.
Her book, Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press in its Comparative Politics series in 2016. The book explores why some violent organizations choose to demilitarize following peace negotiations, whereas others choose to remilitarize and resume violence instead. She argues that the primary driving force behind a return to organized violence is the variation in recruitment patterns within, and between, the warring groups. The book was Honorable Mention for the Conflict Research Society’s 2017 Best Book of the Year Prize.
Her articles on sub-national variation in insurgency onset and war recurrence, organized crime, state strategies towards ethnic minorities in the former Soviet Union, and emotions during processes of transitional justice have appeared or are forthcoming in British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Journal of Peace Research, Political Analysis, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Conflict, Security & Development, and in several edited volumes. Her Journal of Peace Research article was Honorable Mention for the Nils Petter Gleditsch JPR Article of the Year Award. She is currently working on a second book on why citizens vote for political actors that used violence against the civilian population, for which she received the Minerva-United States Institute of Peace, Peace and Security Early Career Scholar Award and was named a 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
Her research has been funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Fulbright Program, United States Institute of Peace, Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Minerva Initiative. She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an affiliate of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.