William Kwok is the Leitner Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. His research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations, and political theory and his scholarly work, broadly speaking, examines conflict and polarization. His book project based on his dissertation, “The Banality of Organization: Mass killings as a coordination problem in the shadow of war,” is a comparative study of the organization of mass killings in Asia and Europe. At Yale’s Leitner Program on Effective Democratic Governance, William is working on a second project about the sources of populism and polarization. His research leverages machine-learning, quantitative, historical, and ethnographic methods.

Previously, William was a BWS Scholar at Heidelberg University in Germany and a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has also held fellowships at the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) in Switzerland and at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research has been generously funded by sources such as Fulbright-Hays DDRA. William received his PhD, MPhil, and MA in political science from Yale University. Prior to graduate school, William worked at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and State Street Corporation.