Welcome! I’m Matt, a Ph.D Candidate with UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs. I’m also the Civil and Political Rights Lead for the Human Rights Measurement Initiative.

I’m Matthew Rains, and I am a Ph.D Candidate in Political Science at UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs. I’ll be joining Whitworth University as an Assistant Professor of International Relations this fall.

My research focuses on human rights measurement, political violence, marginalization and oppression. I most commonly work in the space of two overarching questions: “Why do states target their citizens with violence?” and “How do societal structures of privilege and power lead to non-enjoyment of human rights?”. These questions have launched projects across a number of subfields like political violence, political economy, and measurement. My dissertation is one example, identifying victims of human rights abuse to understand how - and why - states target certain people for abuse. This manifests in other projects, examining widespread or targeted human rights abuse in contexts of nationalism, personalism, civil unrest, and migration.

My research also focuses on difficult measurement questions in political science, and developing solutions to best address them. I have several projects dedicated to development of measurement techniques across a variety of subfields. As Civil and Political Rights Lead of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, I work with a dedicated team of advocates and academics to create yearly data on eight civil and political rights, and additional data on which people are particularly at risk for non-enjoyment of their rights. The under-development Universal Periodic Review Other Stakeholders Engagement dataset (Co-Lead with Chun-Young Park) is centered on the influence and status of non-governmental organizations in the Universal Periodic Review. Other projects include estimating economic gravity to understand human trafficking flows, sequencing international conflict management attempts to discern determinants of mediation strategies, and using text analysis on white supremacist corpus texts to identify dog-whistle racism in digital communications by U.S. Congresspeople.

Outside of my work, I can usually be found backpacking, camping, or developing my skills as an amateur photographer!