Graduate Program

Kai Thaler is a first year graduate student in Government at Harvard with a focus on comparative politics and international relations. His research interests include civil wars, regimes and regime transitions, violence, social movements, and the politics of the Lusophone countries, Africa, and Latin America. He is an Affiliated Researcher of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security (IPRIS). Prior to coming to Harvard, Kai was a consultant for Handicap International for research on armed violence-related disabilities in Colombia, Haiti, Pakistan, and Uganda; a researcher at the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town for a study of everyday violence in South Africa; and a DGARQ/FLAD Research Fellow at the Portuguese national archives, where he studied reports of rebel violence against civilians in Angola and Mozambique in the archives of the Portuguese colonial secret police. He holds an M.Soc.Sc. with honors in Sociology from the University of Cape Town and a B.A. cum laude in Political Science from Yale University.