About
Avantika Singh is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the spatial and structural dimensions of violence, focusing on how territorial arrangements, political institutions, and social hierarchies shape patterns of harm. She uses mixed‑method approaches to study how violence is organized, experienced, and resisted across diverse political contexts.
Avantika has worked across India, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States as a human rights researcher and practitioner. She previously served as Project Lead for the Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset Project at the Pardee Institute for International Futures. At the Sié Chéou‑Kang Center, she supported The Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative and feminist peacebuilding initiatives.
Her experience includes monitoring human rights across seven South Asian countries, where she also documented the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Afghanistan. Additionally, she investigated genocidal rape and forced impregnation in Bosnia, contributed to legal reforms to the Indian Penal Code to center trafficking‑survivor rehabilitation, and aided migration policy at the UN–IOM in Papua New Guinea. In 2019, as a ThinkSwiss Fellow at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, she examined the sociopolitical and psychological drivers of armed group identification during the Bosnian civil war and the use of surveillance and spyware technologies in occupied territories.
