Erica Chenoweth is the Director of Wesleyan University’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, which she established in 2008. Chenoweth is also an Associate of the International Security Program at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is co-editor of Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict, which will be published in 2010 by MIT Press. Chenoweth’s research interests include terrorism, the outcomes of nonviolent and violent protest, and the consequences of political violence and repression on democratization. Chenoweth’s doctoral dissertation investigated the reasons for the use of violence by non-state actors in democracies despite the availability of legal methods for dissent. In a project she has recently completed with Maria Stephan, she has researched the conditions under which nonviolent resistance methods have been more effective than violent methods in achieving strategic goals such as regime change, expelling foreign occupiers, or achieving self-determination.