Julia Raven

Julia Raven is a a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley in political science specializing in military effectiveness and security sector adaptation. Her dissertation project looks at the ethnic exclusion in and effectiveness of contemporary militaries and explores their origins in the colonial era. As part of her dissertation she introduces a novel cross-national dataset of colonial military structures through archival research in British and French archives. Her argument is twofold: 1) colonizing powers varied the design of their colonies militaries, both between colonizers and across a single colonizer's multiple colonies and 2) the presence of veto actors in the immediate post-independence period "locked in" these institutional structures. Raven received her BA in political science and communications studies from UCLA.