Description:

Aliza Luft's research focuses on ethnic, racial, and religious boundary processes, gender, high-risk mobilization, and the causes and consequences of violence.
These interests are reflected in her published papers and ongoing research. In these projects, she examines three aspects of decision-making in violent contexts. First, she studies wartime defection, or how people shift stances from support for state violence to resistance and saving behaviors within the same violent episode. Second, she investigates the relationship between social boundaries and political behaviors, with a specific interest in how racial, ethnic, and religious cleavages inform and are transformed by extreme violence such as genocide. Third, she analyzes the role of gender in politically violent movements. Here, she focuses on how gender informs individual’s decisions to support and participate in war, and how gender is implicated in movement's decisions to adopt violent tactics.