Rate My Professor Scott Gates

Scott Gates is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. He earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1989, an MS in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1985, an MA in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1983, and BAs in Political Science and Anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 1980. His academic career includes serving as Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology since 2003, Associate Professor at Michigan State University from 1996 to 2003, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) from 2002 to 2012. He holds the position of Research Professor at PRIO and has been involved in various visiting roles, including at the University of Trondheim and PRIO earlier in his career.

Gates specializes in research on civil war, armed conflict, peacebuilding, bureaucratic response, power sharing, inequality and conflict, child soldiers, and applied game theoretic analysis in international relations and political economy. His highly influential publications include the article 'Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992' (2001, with Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, and Nils Petter Gleditsch; over 2800 citations), 'Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public' (1999, with John Brehm), 'The Geography of Civil War' (2002, with Halvard Buhaug), and books such as 'Games, Information, and Politics: Applying Game Theoretic Models to Political Science' (1997, with Brian D. Humes) and edited volumes like 'Children and Armed Conflict in the Age of Fractured States' (2009, with Simon Reich) and series on warfare in South Asia (2011, with Kaushik Roy). Recent works cover security force disloyalty, populism and pandemics, and patterns of democracy. In 2025, he received the European Research Council's Advanced Grant of 30 million Norwegian kroner for the five-year 'Waging of War' project on organizational dynamics in warfare and violations of international conventions, such as attacks on healthcare facilities. The PRIO-GRID data framework, to which he contributed, won the J. David Singer Data Innovation Award in 2025. Gates leads projects on conflict trends, judicial behavior in conflict-affected societies, and street-level autocrats.