Dr. Christopher Shay

Dr. Christopher Wiley Shay is a Research Associate at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he contributes to the work of the Crowd Counting Consortium. His research focuses on civil resistance movements, armed insurgencies, and their long-term effects on societies and governance. Shay employs a range of quantitative and field-based methodologies, and his work has been published in the Journal of Global Security Studies, the Journal of Peace Research, The Washington Post, Political Violence at a Glance, and other outlets.

Previously, Shay was a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he studied transitional justice — particularly prosecutions and war crimes trials — and their relationship to democratization and the rule of law. He has also provided analysis on India’s Maoist insurgency (the “Naxalites”) for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and he has conducted fieldwork in Nepal.

Shay holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School, a master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University, and a bachelor’s degree from Hanover College.

Before graduate school, he worked as an outdoor educator and briefly as a wildland firefighter.