Wikipedia

Draft:Dan Miodownik

  • Comment: Please remove external links from the body of the article. The personal life and academic career sections are entirely unreferenced. Sources written by Miodownik (which appear to be every single reference in the article) are primary sources and can't be used to establish notability. Notability is established by significant coverage from reliable, independent sources, per Wikipedia's general notability guidelines. Utopes (talk / cont) 08:34, 8 October 2025 (UTC)


Dan Miodownik
Dan_Miodownik
Born1966 (age 58–59)
Argentina
Academic background
Alma materTel Aviv University (BA, MA)
University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 2005)
Academic work
InstitutionsHebrew University of Jerusalem
WebsiteHome page

Dan Miodownik (born April 14, 1966) is the Max Kampelman Professor in Democracy and Human Rights and a full professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on comparative politics, international relations, and conflict processes. Since joining the Hebrew University faculty in 2006, Miodownik has also served as Director of the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations (2015–2021), Director of the Levi Eshkol Institute for Economic, Social and Political Research of Israel (2020–2023), and Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences (2019–2023).

Personal life

edit

Miodownik was born in Buenos Aires to Samuel and Aida (née Nowak). In 1972, his family immigrated to Israel. He grew up in Bat Yam, attended Herzl Elementary School and Shazar High School, and later studied political science at Tel Aviv University, where he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Miodownik is married to Professor Lilach Nir, also a professor at the Hebrew University, and they have two children.

Academic career

edit

Miodownik’s research examines the ways in which violence—whether directly experienced, transmitted across generations, or embedded in urban environments—affects political behavior and social relations. His work combines computational and agent-based modelling, geospatial methods, surveys, and interviews.

Computational modelling of conflict

edit

A major strand of Miodownik’s early scholarship has centered on computational modelling of conflict, developed through long-term collaborations with Ian Lustick and Ravi Bhavnani. Together, they advanced the use of agent-based modelling and related computational approaches to examine how ethnic polarization, institutional arrangements, and perceptions of inequality shape the onset, dynamics, and recurrence of civil wars. Obver the years he examined how micro-level identity processes can produce macro-level outcomes of polarization and escalation.[1] Further collaborations employed agent-based models to analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and civil war onset,[2] the effects of decentralization on mobilization,[3] and methodological approaches to computational testing of political theories.[4] Other contributions included replication and docking of existing models,[5] the development of a framework for modelling resources and ethnicity in civil wars,[6] and computational tests of preference falsification cascades.[7]

Miodownik also applied these methods to urban conflict. A study in the American Journal of Political Science developed an empirically grounded agent-based model of Jerusalem, using geocoded data to show how segregation and partial contact shaped spatial “hot spots” of violence and to test counterfactual scenarios.[8]

Historical and political legacies of violence

edit

Another area of Miodownik’s work has focused on the long-term consequences of violence for political attitudes and behavior. With Guy Grossman and Devorah Manekin, he examined how combat exposure influenced political preferences, finding that veterans of high-intensity combat were less supportive of compromise and more likely to vote for hard-line parties.[9] With Lilach Nir, he studied perceptions of inequality in post-conflict societies, showing that subjective experiences of exclusion shaped support for violence alongside objective conditions.[10] In collaboration with Amiad Haran-Diman, Miodownik investigated the legacies of the 1948 war. One study found that even 70 years after the war Jewish communities settled on lands taken during the conflict exhibited a persistent tendency to vote for right-wing parties, and exposure to ruins of displaced villages reinforced hawkish attitudes.[11] Another showed that Palestinian villages most affected by the war demonstrated long-term patterns of political risk-aversion and loyalty-signaling evidenced in stronger voting for political parties associated with the Jewish majority.[12]

Urban conflict and Jerusalem

edit

Miodownik has written extensively on Jerusalem, using the city as a case to examine violence, segregation, governance, and potential interventions in divided urban environments. His research shows how routine and exceptional violent events shape conflict trajectories. For example, one study finds that atypical violent acts—such as the murder of a Palestinian child—produced a durable rise in riots compared with more typical lethal events that had short-term effects.[13] Another study analyzed the city’s street network and reported that higher connectivity was associated with more individual attacks but fewer collective clashes, underscoring the role of urban morphology and mobility.[14] Alongside analyses of violence, Miodownik has examined governance and leadership in East Jerusalem. His colleagues and him characterizes community councils as institutions that provide limited forms of urban citizenship in a setting where most residents are stateless and politically marginalized.[15] A complementary study analyzes life-story interviews with local leaders and identifies distinct leadership trajectories (“homecomer,” “middleman,” “pathfinder”) that reflect how actors negotiate authority and relevance in a divided city.[16] A further line of work addresses patterns of residence, mobility, and contact. In a 2014 article, Miodownik and co-authors use an empirically grounded agent-based model of Jerusalem to simulate alternative residential configurations; the study shows that localized segregation can reduce violence under certain conditions, with outcomes conditioned by social distance and contact.[17] Survey research reports that spontaneous encounters between East Jerusalem Palestinian students and Jewish peers in Israeli academic settings are associated with more favorable intergroup attitudes among the former.[18] Miodownik has also studied interventions and proposals for the city’s future. In one article he contrasts state-centric diplomatic approaches focused on sovereignty and security with locally grounded perspectives emphasizing everyday life, tolerance, and mobility.[19] Other work develops a latent-variable index of neighborhood social cohesion for East Jerusalem and finds that higher cohesion correlates with fewer riots, controlling for socioeconomic, political, spatial, and temporal factors.[20] Beyond scholarly publications, he has contributed to public-facing outputs, specifically in the EU funded project “Building Common Visions for the Future of Jerusalem” (2017-2020).[21]

edit

References

edit
  1. ^ Lustick, I. S., Miodownik, D., & Eidelson, R. J. (2004). Secessionism in Multicultural States: Does Sharing Power Prevent or Encourage It? American Political Science Review, 94(2), 209–230. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404001108
  2. ^ JBhavnani, R., & Miodownik, D. (2009). Ethnic Polarization, Ethnic Salience, and Civil War. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53(1), 30–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002708325945
  3. ^ Miodownik, D., & Cartrite, B. (2010). Does Political Decentralization Exacerbate or Ameliorate Ethnopolitical Mobilization? A Test of Contesting Propositions. Political Research Quarterly, 63(4), 731–746. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912909338462
  4. ^ Lustick, I. S., & Miodownik, D. (2009). Abstractions, Ensembles, and Virtualizations: The Titration of Complexity in Agent-Based Modeling. Comparative Politics, 41(2), 223–244. https://doi.org/10.5129/001041509X12911362972070
  5. ^ Miodownik, D., Cartrite, B., & Bhavnani, R. (2010). Between Replication and Docking: “Adaptive Agents, Political Institutions, and Civic Traditions” Revisited. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 13(3). http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/3/1.html
  6. ^ Bhavnani, R., Miodownik, D., & Nart, J. (2008). REsCape: An Agent-Based Framework for Modeling Resources, Ethnicity, and Conflict. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(2). http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/2/7.html
  7. ^ Lustick, I. S., & Miodownik, D. (2020). When do Institutions Suddenly Collapse? Zones of Knowledge and the Likelihood of Political Cascades. Quality & Quantity, 54(2), 413–437. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00883-9
  8. ^ Bhavnani, R., Donnay, K., Miodownik, D., Mor, M., & Helbing, D. (2014). Group Segregation and Urban Violence. American Journal of Political Science, 58(1), 226–245. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12045
  9. ^ Grossman, G., Manekin, D., & Miodownik, D. (2015). The Political Legacies of Combat: Attitudes towards War and Peace among Israeli Ex-Combatants. International Organization, 69(4), 981–1009. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081831500020X
  10. ^ Miodownik, D., & Nir, L. (2016). Receptivity to Violence in Ethnically Divided Societies: A Micro-level Mechanism of Perceived Horizontal Inequalities. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 39(1), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1084162
  11. ^ Harran-Diman, A., & Miodownik, D. (2024). Bloody Pasts and Current Politics: The Political Legacies of Violent Resettlement. Comparative Political Studies, 57(9), 1506–1551. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231194066
  12. ^ Harran-Diman, A., & Miodownik, D. (2024). Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 68(7–8), 1636–1670. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027231195384
  13. ^ {Weiss, C., Tsur, N., Miodownik, D., Lupu, Y., & Finkel, E. (2024). Atypical Violence and Conflict Dynamics: Evidence from Jerusalem. Political Science Research and Methods, 12(2), 399–406. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.39
  14. ^ Rokem, J., Weiss, C. M., & Miodownik, D. (2018). Geographies of Violence in Jerusalem: The Spatial Logic of Urban Intergroup Conflict. Political Geography, 66, 88–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.08.008
  15. ^ Avni, N., Brenner, N., Rosen, G., & Miodownik, D. (2022). Building Urban Citizenship in Contested Cities: The Case of Community Councils in East Jerusalem. Urban Geography, 43(4), 546–566. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1878430
  16. ^ {Brenner, N., Shenhav, S. R., & Miodownik, D. (2022). Leadership Development in Divided Cities: The Homecomer, Middleman and Pathfinder. Journal of Urban Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2021.2016427
  17. ^ {Bhavnani, R., Donnay, K., Miodownik, D., Mor, M., & Helbing, D. (2014). Group Segregation and Urban Violence. American Journal of Political Science, 58(1), 226–245. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12045
  18. ^ Faibish, N., Rajabi, N., Miodownik, D., & Maoz, I. (2023). Spontaneous Contact and Intergroup Attitudes in Asymmetric Protracted Ethno-National Conflict: East Jerusalem Palestinian Students in an Israeli Academic Setting. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 29(4), 385–388. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000683
  19. ^ Lehrs, L., Brenner, N., Avni, N., & Miodownik, D. (2023). Seeing peace like a city: Local visions and diplomatic proposals for future solutions. Peacebuilding, 11(4), 425–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2023.2219130
  20. ^ Harran-Diman, A., & Miodownik, D. (2024). Social Cohesion and Violence: Explaining Riots in East Jerusalem. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 47(12), 1772–1799. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2074394
  21. ^ Miodownik, Dan (2023). "Building Common Visions for the Future of Jerusalem". LinkedIn.
This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.
Categories:
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Dan_Miodownik&oldid=1315725545"