Johnny Meyer Wins NSF Research Fellowship

Johnny Meyer, a government graduate student studying comparative politics and political theory, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship available to an American graduate student.

Meyer proposed a study of the conditions under which illicit market participants engage in political violence, with the social science goal of refining theories that grapple with the tensions between individuals’ rational and irrational behavior. As an initial case study Meyer has proposed investigating the kidnapping of politicians and political candidates along the U.S.-Mexico border. Meyer’s research might ultimately look at cases including drug trafficking in Colombia and human smuggling in Sudan.