I'm a researcher at the German Institute for Development Evaluation's (DEval) Department of State Fragility, Conflict, and Governance, where I contribute to an evaluative study on the effectiveness of development interventions to promote and protect democracy, as well as an evaluation of German interventions to support decentralization in Africa. I'm also the Senior Advisor on Quantitative Methods of the Beyond Compliance Consortium at the University of York. Before joining DEval, I was an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Political Science at the Department of Politics & International Relations, University of York, and a research fellow at the Michael Nicholson Centre for Conflict and Cooperation, University of Essex. Beginning March 2026, I will join the Center for Crisis Early Warning (CCEW) at the Bundeswehr University Munich.

My research focuses on the dynamics of contentious politics. In particular, I study the causes and consequences of violent and nonviolent mobilization, the behavior of armed actors, civil-military relations, and UN peacekeeping. My work has been awarded the NEPS Medal and the PSS(I) Moore Prize, and is published in leading journals such PLOS ONE, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Peace Research. I take a special interest in teaching empirical conflict studies, causal inference, and machine learning, and am a recipient of the Essex Excellence in Education teaching award. I developed two R packages that I maintain on CRAN.

In previous appointments, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Anatomy of Resistance Campaigns project at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and held a position as research associate at the University of Mannheim. I was also appointed research associate at the University of the German Federal Armed Forces, working as scientific advisor in support of an IBM-led project developing a crisis early warning system for Germany’s Ministry of Defence. I was invited as visiting researcher to Princeton University, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and GESIS. I hold a PhD from the University of Essex and a diploma from the Norwegian Research School on Peace and Conflict.

To get in touch, drop me an email at christoph.dworschak[at]deval.org