Noyonika Das is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam, where her dissertation, Violence for Control: Explaining Violent Local Elections in India, examined how political parties use violence to shape local electoral competition and establish political control. Her research focuses on political violence, democratic backsliding, and South Asia. She is especially interested in election violence, party organization, and subnational conflict dynamics. Her work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, and her doctoral research was awarded the Sydney Bailey Prize by the Conflict Research Society. She teaches courses on  authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and research design, and supervises undergraduate and graduate student research.

Keywords and research expertise

• Conflict and Contentious Politics
• Election Violence

Current research projects

Noyonika’s current research examines how political parties use violence and coercion to shape electoral competition, build local organizational power, and establish partisan control. Building on her doctoral dissertation, Violence for Control: Explaining Violent Local Elections in India, her work focuses on local elections in South Asia and asks how violence is used not only to influence electoral outcomes, but also to regulate candidate entry, deter opposition activity, manage intra-party conflict, and control access to local political authority.

A second strand of her research, developed in collaboration with Sebastian Pantoja Barrios, examines pre-electoral violence and the structuring of electoral competition in Colombia. Together, these projects advance a broader comparative research agenda on how violence shapes democratic competition across different political contexts. Her work uses mixed methods, combining quantitative analysis, spatial analysis, and qualitative fieldwork.