Sana Jaffrey

Sana Jaffrey is a nonresident scholar in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is concurrently the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), Jakarta.

Jaffrey’s ongoing book project investigates the puzzling rise of vigilante violence in Asia, increasingly fueled by disinformation circulated on social media platforms. It draws on original quantitative data and extensive fieldwork in Indonesia to show how legacies of state-building interact with democratic politics to produce sub-national patterns of order and disorder.

Her research has been published on various academic and policy platforms. During her previous appointment at the World Bank (2008-2013), Jaffrey led the implementation of the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) data project in Indonesia. Comprised of over 240,000 unique incidents that can be disaggregated across 40 distinct variables, it is the largest publicly available violence dataset compiled for any single country.

Jaffrey received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. Her dissertation on vigilantism in Indonesia was awarded the 2020 prize for best dissertation fieldwork from the American Political Science Association. She has an MA from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.