Joan Barceló

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Network Assistant Professor of Politics at New York University. My research examines political violence, state repression, intergroup conflict, and postwar political dynamics. I study how violence and institutional interventions shape civic engagement, political behavior, social trust, and reconciliation in divided societies.

I approach these questions using tools from applied causal inference, including field and survey experiments, natural experiments, and quasi-experimental designs, choosing the design that best fits the question and setting. I also work with observational data, meta-analysis, and historical measurement when they offer the most credible way to answer a particular question.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading political science journals, including American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, as well as in interdisciplinary outlets such as PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS Nexus, Scientific Data, and Social Science & Medicine.

You can find my Google Scholar profile here and my CV here.

Prior to starting at NYUAD, I obtained a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis' Political Science Department in 2019. Before completing my PhD, I interned at the United Nations – ESCAP in Bangkok in 2013 and stayed as visiting graduate scholar at NYU Shanghai (2014), the Nuffield College at the University of Oxford (2017), and the University of Mannheim (2018).