Rate My Professor Scott Gates

Gates specializes in research on civil war, armed conflict, peacebuilding, bureaucratic response, power sharing, inequality and conflict, child soldiers, and applied game theoretic analysis in international relations and political economy. His highly influential publications include the article 'Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992' (2001, with Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, and Nils Petter Gleditsch; over 2800 citations), 'Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public' (1999, with John Brehm), 'The Geography of Civil War' (2002, with Halvard Buhaug), and books such as 'Games, Information, and Politics: Applying Game Theoretic Models to Political Science' (1997, with Brian D. Humes) and edited volumes like 'Children and Armed Conflict in the Age of Fractured States' (2009, with Simon Reich) and series on warfare in South Asia (2011, with Kaushik Roy). Recent works cover security force disloyalty, populism and pandemics, and patterns of democracy. In 2025, he received the European Research Council's Advanced Grant of 30 million Norwegian kroner for the five-year 'Waging of War' project on organizational dynamics in warfare and violations of international conventions, such as attacks on healthcare facilities. The PRIO-GRID data framework, to which he contributed, won the J. David Singer Data Innovation Award in 2025. Gates leads projects on conflict trends, judicial behavior in conflict-affected societies, and street-level autocrats.