David S. Siroky, PhD
David Siroky is a Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida, where he is Director of the Violence, Conflict and Security Lab, and a Core Faculty Member of the Florida Institute for National Security. He is also affiliated with the AI in Politics Lab at UF, and is an Associate Member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.
He studies conflict, cooperation and collective action in politics and economics. Most of this work has focused on three substantive areas: (1) nationalism, particularly its separatist and irredentist strains; (2) the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency; and (3) great power politics and fragile states. He is also engaged in research on methodology, and has mainly worked on (1) AI and machine learning, (2) microscale models of complex systems, and (3) causal inference with unobtrusive experimental techniques for sensitive topics.
These efforts appear in forty peer-reviewed articles, printed in some of the leading journals, and in Defection Denied: A Study of Civilian Support for Insurgency in Irregular War (Elements in Experimental Political Science, Cambridge University Press, 2022), which analyses the nature and sources of civilian support for militant groups during wartime utilizing unobtrusive survey experiments.
Currently, he is finalizing a book called Clients, Rivals and Rogues: Why Great Powers Intervene in Revolutionary Civil Wars, which is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2025). It investigates why and where great powers have (and have not) intervened in regime conflicts around the world, from the Second World War to the present, using innovative data and modeling to test a new theory of major power intervention against rival explanations.
His next book project is called Predicting Secession: Means, Motives and Mobilization. It conceptualizes secession as a dynamic multi-actor process, and uses political economy theories along with machine learning methods to forecast escalatory dynamics in self-determination movements.
He has received major grants as PI and co-PI from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of State, and National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, along with research fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Zentrum fuer Interkulturelle Studien in Germany and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in France.
Research Interests
Selected Recent Publications
2023. Christopher W. Hale and David S. Siroky, Irredentism and Institutions, British Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 498-515. [link, pdf]
2023. Emil Souleimanov, David S. Siroky and Roberto Colombo, Blood Revenge in Civil War: Proof of Concept, Security Studies, 32(1), 101-136. [link, pdf] [short essay for Modern War Institute, West Point, USA]
2022. David S. Siroky, Valery Dzutsati and Lenka Bustikova, Defection Denied: A Study of Civilian Support for Insurgency in Irregular War, Cambridge Elements Series in Experimental Political Science. Cambridge University Press. [[link]
2022. Emil Aslan Souleimanov, David S. Siroky and Peter Krause, Kin Killing: Why Governments Target Family Members in Insurgency and When it Works, Security Studies, 31(2), 187-217. [link, pdf] [short essay for Modern War Institute, West Point, USA]
2022. David S. Siroky, Emil Aslan Souleimanov, Jean-Francois Ratelle and Milos Popovic, Purifying the Religion: An Analysis of Haram Targeting among Salafi Jihadi Groups, Comparative Politics, 54(3): [link] [pdf]
2021. David S. Siroky, Milos Popovic and Nikola Mirilovic, "Unilateral Secession, Great Power Contestation and International Recognition," Journal of Peace Research, 58(5): 1049-1067 [link] [pdf]
