Dr. Tonya Dodez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, specializing in Comparative Politics. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University-Bloomington, with a degree minor in African Studies. Prior to joining the faculty and staff at Mississippi State University, Dr. Dodez was a 2022-2023 Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, which funds policy-driven research aimed at conflict management and peacebuilding. More specifically, Dr. Dodez’s work has aimed to understand the electoral circumstances that incentivize violent behavior, societal responses to political violence, and potential policy avenues emphasizing violence prevention by removing those incentives for violent political contestation. To this end, her teaching and research interests are situated at the intersection of contentious politics, political behavior, and (de)democratization across the Global South, with a primary regional focus in Africa. Leveraging her regional knowledge and advanced proficiency in French and Wolof (local language spoken in Senegal), Dr. Dodez’s research routinely draws on evidence from original data which she collects through interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and archival research in West Africa, with most of her fieldwork experience, to date, having taken place in Senegal.

Advancing evidence and findings from her dissertation research in Senegal, Dr. Dodez’s current book project, Fight or Flight in Africa’s Emerging Democracies: The Consequences of Electoral Violence in Senegal, examines variation in citizen responses to different experiences with electoral violence and intimidation and the actions available to them under varying circumstances. Contributing to an unresolved debate as to when and why electoral violence encourages collective mobilization, her findings demonstrate (a) how various tactics of electoral violence provoke different responses from citizens and (b) which actions taken by civil society diminish the electoral efficacy of violence by enhancing the capacity of voters to hold repressive leaders accountable. The book utilizes original qualitative and quantitative evidence from Senegalese elections, to develop a novel typology – which classifies various distinct instances of electoral violence by their degree of salience and perpetrator ambiguity – and test a set of theoretical predictions concerning how each typology classification provokes a different set of responses from citizens, both individually and collectively.  

At Mississippi State University, Dr. Dodez teaches Introduction to Comparative Government, various upper-division comparative politics courses (including African Politics and Politics of the 3^rd World), as well as special topics courses, such as Human Rights and Anxieties of Elections Across the Globe.

For more information about Dr. Dodez’s teaching and research, visit her website by clicking here.