Erica De Bruin

Erica De Bruin is director of the Policing Lab at the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College. De Bruin’s research interests include civil-military relations, civil war, and policing. Her work focuses on the causes and dynamics of military coups, the spread of militarized policing and the ways in which armed groups build legitimacy. She is the author of How to Prevent Coups d’état: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020). De Bruin is currently working on National Science Foundation-funded projects on the determinants of civilian support for armed groups and the global spread of militarized policing. She was previously a non-resident Fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and Fellow with the Civil War Paths Project at the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the University of York. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014.