Research Design in Politics and International Relations

This textbook offers the definitive guide to starting your research project in Politics and IR. It shows how methods come alive when applied to real political dilemmas and offers an accessible framework to help make intentional and considered choices across all stages of research—from formulating a question to selecting a design, collecting data, and analysing results.

Rigterink and Schomerus introduce seven core research designs – spanning discourse analysis and ethnography to quasi-experiments and process tracing – through contemporary political topics such as violent conflict, the environment and political protests.

What sets this book apart is starting with topics rather than methods, so you’ll learn how to research real-world issues like climate change, inequality, or war, and see how different research designs can help you understand them. It’s also honest about the challenges of research, offering practical strategies to overcome distractions, doubts, and demotivation. 

Ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is as much a practical manual as a conceptual map for navigating the terrain of political research that makes doing research manageable and enjoyable.

Anouk S. Rigterink is Associate Professor in Quantitative Comparative Politics, at Durham University, UK. 
Mareike Schomerus is VP at Busara, a research institute headquartered in Kenya, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, USA.
 

Anouk S. Rigterink is Associate Professor in Quantitative Comparative Politics, at Durham University, UK. Anouk has also taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in research methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. Anouk has published widely on violent conflict, terrorism, and natural resources. This includes work on mining and conflict, on community monitoring of forest resources, on drone strikes as a counterterrorism policy and on behavioural mechanisms in conflict and post-conflict. Many of these publications would not have existed without productive and rewarding co-authorship with Mareike Schomerus. Anouk has published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, among others. Formerly, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University and International Crisis Group, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mareike Schomerus is VP at Busara, a research institute headquartered in Kenya, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she teaches different research methods. Mareike has published widely on violent conflict, international development and conflict-resolution, evidence-based policy, and behavioural mechanisms in post-conflict recovery. Many of these publications are co-authored with Anouk S. Rigterink in a fruitful inter-epistemological collaboration spanning close to two decades. Mareike co-edited volumes (on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan) and authored The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023, open access here). She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI. Before becoming a social scientist, Mareike worked as a journalist. Mareike holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as advanced degrees from Columbia University, the University of Bremen, and Smith College.