I am broadly interested in the causes, nature and outcomes of political violence, insecurity of minority groups, state repression, civilians in conflict zones and forms of resistance. I use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods in my research, with a focus on text as data, "big data" for social science research, statistical analysis, network approaches, in-depth qualitative interviews and archival research.

I run a hard-science style “research lab” - the O/R Lab - which uses a team-based, multi-method approach to producing public-facing basic research related to oppression and resistance.

You can see my CV here.

Ongoing Research Projects

Working Book Manuscript: The Built Environment Of Conflict

States today regularly encounter a tension between defending their public from “terrorist” threats (real and imagined) that challenge their security, on one hand, and avoiding overtly targeting minority subsets of their populace with undue rights restrictions, on the other. A purportedly innocuous solution for states is to increase “nonviolent” measures of state control—such as checkpoints and closure obstacles—actions, which states justify as necessary to ensure security. In a working book manuscript, I develop a theory about the tangible, daily effects of the“built environment of conflict.” I define this as the human-made, physical structures placed in civilian living spaces designed to achieve social control in times of war or conflict.

I argue that states’ built environments of conflict are material manifestations of state power that certain, targeted citizens experience as violence. Because many more people pass through checkpoints, past guard towers, and around closure obstacles then experience direct violence (being shot, for example), these built environments become a powerful symbol of the state. This state power selectively surveilles and disciplines individual behavior; disrupts social and community life; inhibits economic productivity; and inflicts physical violence, humiliation, and frustration. These experiences foster anger against the state and increase support for a range of modalities of resistance, including “existence as resistance” efforts, nonviolent resistance movements, and militancy. But because these built environments are constructed and imposed on communities in different ways (often intentionally targeting minority communities), they also structure and vary the nature and texture of resistance in those spaces. I explore this dynamic and the tension between the conception of terrorism and states’ use of built structures to dominate subsets of the populace—as well as considering how this impacts popular resistance to state violence—with reference to Great Britain, Israel/Palestine and the United States.

Internment, Torture and Pro-government Militia in Northern Ireland (with Sarah K. Dreier and Dani Villa, and supported by Michael McCann and Noah Smith (co-PIs))

How do liberal democracies justify policies that violate the rights of targeted subsets of their citizenry? When facing national security emergencies (real or imagined) which threaten a state's sovereignty or national narratives, government officials in countries throughout the world exempt themselves from maintaining certain rights-based protections and selectively surrender their commitments to democratic legal processes. States target select racial, religious, or ethnic groups—often construed as foreigners who threaten existing laws or institutions — with extrajudicial surveillance, internment without trial, or torture. In democracies with liberal constitutions, such repressive state policies directly violate basic constitutional guarantees to liberty, equal protection, and due process. Understanding how these rights protections are eroded is of central importance to this political moment. This project sheds light on these dynamics through systematically analyzing the British Prime Ministers’ recently declassified security-related correspondence files. These files document the lead up to, as well as the internal discussions and decisions about, Northern Ireland’s use of internment without trial between 1971 and 1973, using a combination of qualitative process tracing and NLP methods. This project is funded by National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Award #1823547 - “Civil Rights Violations and the Democratic Rule of Law,” (Emily K. Gade, Principal Investigator, with co-PIs Michael McCann and Noah Smith, 2018-2020). 

Big Bombs and Militant Networks

I am currently working with a research team of graduate and undergraduate students from Emory and the University of Washington to evaluate the role of the Syrian state’s use of weapons of mass effect (as well as foreign airstrikes) on the patterns of alliance formation and infighting among militant groups in the Syrian Civil War. We evaluate how and whether the use of more extreme violence by one militant group affects the use of violence by other militant groups in the network. This project is funded by the United States Air Force  Academy Young Investigator Award #FA7000-18-0017 — "Understanding the Impacts of WMD/WME Attacks on Patterns of Militant Group Tactical Cooperation, Alliance Formation, Infighting, Outbidding, and Extremism" (Emily K. Gade, Principal Investigator, 2018-2020). 

Rebel Consolidation (with Mike Gabbay (PI) and Mohammed Hafez (co-PI), and Marcella Morris and Megan Erickson)

I am currently working with a research team from the University of Washington, the Naval Postgraduate School and Emory University to evaluate the process of rebel consolidation in civil conflict. While numerous studies have evaluated the process of rebel fragmentation, no comprehensive analysis of the causes and process of rebel consolidation (both cooperative and conflictual) has yet been conducted. We are in the early phases of addressing this research gap. This work is supported by a grant from the Minerva Initiative/U.S. Army Research Office Award #75193-LS-MRI, ``Rising to the Top: Armed Group Consolidation in Civil Wars and Fragile States," (Michael Gabbay, Principal Investigator, with co-PIs Emily K. Gade and Mohammed Hafez, 2019-2022).

Published Articles and Chapters

``Ideology in Civil Wars," with Mohammed Hafez and Mike Gabbay, book chapter accepted for publication in the Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations, edited by Mark Haas and Jonathan Leader Maynard (2021).

``Why Data Science Needs Qualitative Thinking," (2021). Tanweer, Anissa Emily K. Gade, Peaks Krafft and Sarah K. Dreier. Harvard Data Science Review. Article product of NSF Grant.

“Dangers, Toils, and Snares: U.S. Senators' Rhetoric of Public Insecurity and Religiosity," (2020). Sarah Dreier, Emily K. Gade, Jon Schaeffer, and John Wilkerson. Politics and Religion.

“Archived Attributes:  A Web Archive Approach to Measuring Legislator Attributes," (2020). Emily K. Gade, Sarah Dreier, John Wilkerson and Anne Washington. British Journal of Political Science.

“Social Isolation and Repertoires of Resistance,'' (2020). Emily K. Gade. American Political Science Review.  Winner of APSA's 2021 Alexander George Best Article Award for the best article using qualitative research methods published in 2020. See here for supplementary materials.

Gade, Emily K., Michael Gabbay, Mohammed Hafez and Zane Kelly. “Networks of Cooperation: Rebel Alliances in Fragmented Civil Wars,” OnlineFirst at the Journal of Conflict Resolution. See here for replication files.

If you replicate this article, please note: Models here were run with AME setting R=1; Ideology correlates at the 99% level with the second eiganvector (which is controlled for in R=2+ models). Dr. Mike Gabbay, Dr. Shahryar Minhas, and I are currently working on a research note to investigate how/to what extent AME is able to distinguish between higher-order patterns caused by a substantive variable and higher-order noise using simulated data.

Gade, Emily K., Mohammed Hafez, and Michael Gabbay. "Fratricide in Rebel Movements: A Network Analysis of Syrian Militant Infighting," OnlineFirst at the Journal of Peace Research. See here for replication files. This article won the JPR Article of the Year award for 2019.

Gade, Emily K., John Wilkerson, and Anne Washington. “The .GOV Internet Archive: A Big Data Resource for Political Science,” The Political Methodologist, March 2017. See here for replication files.

Eastin, Joshua C. and Emily K. Gade. “Beheading the Hydra: Counterinsurgent Violence and Insurgent Attacks in Iraq.” Terrorism and Political Violence. Published Online, June 2016. See here for replication files.

Gade, Emily K. "Defining the Non-Combatant: How Do We Determine Who Is Worthy of Protection in Violent Conflict," Journal of Military Ethics, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2010): 220-243.

Gade, Emily K. "Child Soldier: The Question of Self Defense," Journal of Military Ethics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2011): 323-326.