Stephanie Wright

Stephanie Wright is a PhD candidate in the Security, Peace, and Conflict subfield of the Political Science Department at Duke University, conducting research on the effects of recognition of subnational groups on identity and grievance in conflict-affected countries. Her current research uses an original survey experiment to compare how inducing respondents to consider either cultural or territorial recognition of the Kurds in the 2005 Constitution of Iraq influences identity and grievance among Iraqi-Kurd participants. Prior to joining Duke, she conducted qualitative interviews with Karen Refugees in Mae Rama Luang refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Myanmar to investigate the relationship between land, displacement, identity, and recognition for her undergraduate honors thesis at Washington University in St. Louis, for which she received the Todd Lewis Friedman Memorial Prize for Outstanding Work in International and Comparative Politics. At Duke, she has worked as a co-investigator on several projects with Duke Political Science faculty and graduate students, including projects focusing on international endorsement of secession, measuring repression at the individual level, and authoritarian nostalgia after genocide.